A new language on the school block

O'Neill — which calls itself Nebraska's Irish capital — might be the last place you'd expect to find students learning Mandarin.

But early one morning last month, the superintendent interviewed a teaching candidate half a world away via computer.

If all goes according to plan, the candidate will teach Chinese in the O'Neill, Chambers and West Holt school districts this coming school year.

“We all really said Chinese was the way to go as far as language,” said O'Neill Superintendent Amy Shane.

The number of youngsters learning Chinese is small but growing.

The Omaha and Lincoln school districts, which offer the language at the high school level, are looking to expand to lower grades. Several school districts across Nebraska have expressed interest in starting programs.

The interest stems partly from the nation's growing economic and political interaction with China, where Mandarin is the official and most commonly spoken native language. Omaha employers who do business in China say speaking the language can be valuable for job applicants.

“More and more companies are looking at China every day,” said Marisa Ring, the international business development manager for the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce.

In the world of language education, though, Mandarin is still on the B list.

In Nebraska, far more students study Spanish, French or German. More students, in fact, study Latin — a dead language.

Only the Omaha and Lincoln school districts offer Chinese classes, with a total of 185 students from those two districts studying it last year.

In Iowa's graduating class of 2007, only 43 students studied Chinese. More than 24,000 learned Spanish.

But Vickie Scow, Nebraska's world language education director, said she expects more districts to start offering Chinese.

Both the Chinese and U.S. governments are pushing to increase the number of U.S. students learning the language, said Nancy Rhodes, director of foreign language education for the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington.

The U.S. Department of Education is more willing to fund programs in Mandarin and Arabic than the languages traditionally taught in schools. Rhodes said the federal government thinks such programs will help improve national security, commerce and international relations.

Among U.S. elementary schools that offer foreign language, the percentage that teach Chinese increased tenfold from 1997 to 2008, according to a survey conducted by the center. However, the share of such schools teaching Chinese is only 3 percent.

China sends instructors to the United States through the Office of Chinese Language Council International, a nonprofit organization known as Hanban. The Hanban-funded Confucius Institute at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, established in 2007, is working with the Omaha and Lincoln school districts to expand their programs by helping to develop curriculum and find instructors.

The Confucius Institute also takes public school officials on two-week tours of China. The program's ultimate goal is to encourage the districts to teach Chinese. This year, five administrators from Omaha and three from Kearney toured the country.

For Kearney, money is the biggest obstacle to offering the language.

Carol Renner, the district's associate superintendent, said she had long hoped to start a Chinese language program but hasn't found funding to pay for textbooks or an instructor. But she said the district has a responsibility to prepare its students to work side by side with native Chinese speakers.

“We need to help our students be more culturally interested and globally minded,” she said.

In O'Neill, the program will be subsidized by a guest teacher program offered by the College Board, the nonprofit organization that oversees the SAT. The teacher will work three days a week in O'Neill and one day a week each in Chambers and West Holt.

The classes will be available to students in other neighboring districts via the Internet. The instructor will stay for at least one year and as long as three.

O'Neill will offer two years of Chinese at the high school level, a culture class in middle school and an introductory language class at the elementary level.

The Omaha district has applied for a $600,000 federal grant to expand its Chinese language program to the elementary level and provide more instructor training. That would allow students to take four years of Mandarin. Chinese classes are already available at Beveridge Middle School and South, Burke and Central High Schools.

John Herse, who graduated from Burke in May, took two years of Chinese. He had studied Spanish for several years and wanted to try something different.

The Chinese character system of writing fascinated Herse. In Mandarin, each character has its own meaning, while English and most European languages combine letters to form meaning.

“It's just totally different from all the other languages I've ever looked at,” Herse said.

After two years of instruction, Herse knows enough to introduce himself and hold a basic conversation in Mandarin. He can order a meal or talk about the weather.

He plans to study the language when he attends the University of Pittsburgh in the fall, as well as study abroad in China. He eventually would like to work for the United Nations or a philanthropic organization as a liaison between China and the United States.

A number of Omaha businesses have ties to China ranging from importing goods from the country to locating offices there. The chamber's Ring, who sits on the board of directors of the Midwest International Trade Association, said the latter group is offering a 10-week conversational Chinese course for its members.

“It helps to have a basic understanding of languages and culture,” she said. “It can make your business trips a lot more successful.”

The vast majority of Americans speak only one language. According to a 2005 U.S. Senate resolution declaring 2005 the “Year of Foreign Language Study,” only 9 percent of U.S. citizens speak their native language and a second language fluently, while about half of Europeans are multilingual.

The ability to speak Mandarin or another language can give job seekers an edge.

Craig Stoffel, executive vice president of global logistics at Omaha-based Werner Enterprises, said about half of the trucking and transportation company's international business is done with China. For its international division, speaking another language is a must.

Werner established operations in China in 2006, launching a push to hire new employees who could speak Chinese. Today, nine of the company's employees in Omaha speak Chinese.

Out of 2,575 nondriver employees in North America, he said, 135 speak more than one language, and more multilingual employees work in the company's offices overseas.

“We don't really ask if you speak another language anymore,” Stoffel said. “We ask how many.”

Contact the writer:

444-1229, elliot.njus@owh.com