VA Governor's Foreign Language Academies

The Virginia STARTALK Chinese Academy (VSCA) joins the six other Virginia Governor’s Academies for the first time in 2008. Funded through a federal grant secured by the Virginia Department of Education, the Chinese Academy will be integrated into the existing framework of the Virginia Governor’s Foreign Language Academies (GFLA). Since 1986, the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) has sponsored the GFLA, summer residential programs for Virginia's most motivated foreign language students. As of 2007, over 6,250 students have completed one of the six three-week programs. Since 2004 all of the academies have been housed at Virginia Commonwealth University under the umbrella of “A Global Village.” The Virginia STARTALK Chinese Academy runs concurrently with the existing programs, sharing space in the residence hall complex and on campus, and participating in joint activities. The VSCA is modeled after the Governor’s Japanese and Russian Academies, which accept beginners to the target languages as well as students with a prior background. Students in these partial-immersion academies receive an average of 7 hours of instruction per day yielding approximately 140 clock hours of instruction over the course of the three-week program. The curriculum for beginners mirrors that of the online Mandarin Chinese I course currently offered through the Virginia Department of Education’s Virtual Virginia program and students will meet the benchmarks for Modern Foreign Language Level I of the newly revised Virginia Foreign Language Standards of Learning (SOL), adjusted slightly for the skills of reading and writing to accommodate the non-Roman alphabet. The Standard of Learning are based on the five “C’s” of Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities of the National Standards for Foreign Language Education. Students with prior study of Chinese are grouped together and instruction is differentiated to meet their needs. In addition to direct language instruction and real-life opportunities for presentational, interpretive, and interpersonal communication using the target language, students participate in a wide variety of social and recreational co-curricular activities focusing on Chinese culture.