Parent involvement in teaching elementary-level Chinese, Japanese, and Korean

A year-long, federally funded curriculum project between an elementary school and a state university is described in which international parents from the community were trained as instructors of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. In Phase 1 of the project, classes of selected students from Grades 1, 2, 3, and 4 were formed and taught by foreign-language education graduate students who were native speakers of the 3 Asian languages. In Phase 2, after the language classes were well established, videotapes were made to help train 3 selected native-speaking parents who, in Phase 3, took over instruction of the classes. Qualitative data that were collected by interviews and observations indicated that students were very positive and benefited greatly from this parent-involvement model, which can be used easily by other schools to establish programs to teach these critical, but less commonly taught languages.