Our Lady's Christian School

Mandarin Program

All OLC students in kindergarten through eighth grade learn Mandarin Chinese. The number of classes per week varies by grade level:

  • Kindergarten through second grades have one 30-minute class per week;
  • Third through eighth grades have two 30-minute classes per week.

If students wish to continue taking Mandarin after graduating from OLC, it is currently offered by Cathedral Prep, McDowell Intermediate and McDowell High School, among others.

Benefits of Learning a Foreign Language

  • Research shows that students who learn a second language develop better critical thinking skills and have a better understanding of their native language.
  • Studying a foreign language improves academic skills by enhancing students’ abilities in reading, writing and mathematics.
  • Students with command of a second language tend to score higher on both the verbal and math portions of the SAT.
  • People can learn languages at any age, but studies suggest that learning a language is easier before adolescence. A number of researchers have found that children have an innate ability to acquire the rules of any language; this ability diminishes by adulthood.

Why Chinese?

  • Roughly 1.3 billion people worldwide speak Chinese, making it the most widely spoken first language in the world.
  • Chinese is also the third most commonly spoken language in the United States after English and Spanish.
  • In 2007, Chinese surpassed English as the most-used language on the Internet according to the World Intellectual Property Organization.
  • While the State Department has designated Chinese a "critical language," meaning knowledge of it is critical to the nation’s security and prosperity, the most recent data show that only 24,000 students in grades seven to 12 study it.

Mandarin in the News

Mandarin Learning Soars Outside China
BBC News, January 9, 2007
In just five years, the number of non-Chinese people learning Mandarin Chinese has soared to 30 million. What is fuelling this expansion, and will it change the status of English as a global language?

With a Changing World Comes An Urgency to Learn Chinese
The Washington Post, August 26, 2006
Pearl Terrell was so determined that her great-granddaughter begin learning Chinese that she spent two weeks this summer driving 100 miles a day so the soon-to-be fifth-grader could learn the language.

Get Ahead, Learn Mandarin
Time Magazine, June 19, 2006
While English may be the only truly international language, millions of tongues are wagging over what is rapidly becoming the world's other lingua franca: Mandarin.

The Future Doesn't Speak French
Newsweek, May 9, 2006
Aware of the challenges ahead, American students are rushing to learn Chinese.