Feature: Argentina looks to future with experiment on Chinese-Spanish bilingual education

"In the past, one learnt French for literature and English for business. What is the language of the future? Maybe Chinese," tweeted Buenos Aires mayor Mauricio Macri, when the world's first Chinese-Spanish bilingual public school opened here in March last year.

Over the past year, the Chinese-Spanish educational experiment has been running smoothly, growing from initially offering only kindergarten and preschool to the first grade of primary school, with the number of students doubling from 50 to 100.

Among the 100 students, 50 were enrolled this year to the pre-school classes, and the other half enrolled last year have become first grade students. The school, opened thanks to the joint efforts of the municipal governments of Buenos Aires and Beijing, hopes to eventually have some 400 students.

"Everything is going pretty well with those children, and I'm thrilled by their progress," said Carlos Regazzoni, director of the city's Educational Bureau.

Sitting at 351 Monteagudo St. in the capital, the school is featured with many Chinese elements, including newly enrolled students trying to greet each other with "nihao" (hello), and colorful papers printed with Chinese character "huanying" (welcome), on classroom doors. Students are taught Spanish in the morning and Chinese in the afternoon.

Students were eager to show their Chinese. Luna, a first-grade Argentine, volunteered to read a story about a dog in Chinese.

Ethnic Chinese students in this school are mostly second generation immigrants, who are more diffident and reserved compared with the Argentine children, but they work harder, Chinese teacher Zhang Fang told Xinhua.

"Sometimes it's hard to balance the different needs of Chinese kids and Argentine kids," Zhang said.

"For example, Chinese kids usually learn Chinese quicker and better than those from Argentine families. But we cannot speed up the teaching process for their sake," Zhang said. "We create more opportunities for those children to communicate with and help each other through practice."

Wu Yuhua, who is in charge of this project at the city's Educational Bureau, said that immersing in the bilingual environment and interacting with each other have been proved effective and important for the students to master a foreign language.

"We need the support from parents for the experiment of taking basic education and learning a foreign language at the same time. We believe that it will yield very good results if their children finish the six-year period," Wu said.

Han Mengtang, the cultural attache at the Chinese Embassy in Buenos Aires, said the school helps forge connections between Chinese immigrants and their motherland, and more importantly, it builds bridges between the different ethnic cultures in Argentina, among the younger generation.

This school is a boon to local residents and hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants here, who have long worried about their children's Chinese-language skills.

About 120,000 Chinese immigrants live in this South American country and around 2,000 babies of Chinese descent are born here every year. Before the bilingual school, most parents had to make the tough decision of sending their children back to China for primary education.

"Getting Chinese education here is a dream that comes true," said a mother of a student in the school, with the family name of Xue. Endi