About 100 Virginia Beach middle-school students took to the stage at Tallwood High School on Tuesday to show off their new language skills with song, dance and poetry. They had just spent the past couple of weeks learning Chinese, Arabic and Russian at the STARTALK program hosted by Virginia Beach Public Schools.
The goal, Kelly Arble, the division’s world languages coordinator and STARTALK program director, is to allow students, no matter their skill level, to get exposed to these languages and urge them to continue learning.
“After the program, students want to keep learning their new language and are looking for opportunities to keep learning,” Arble said.
The 12-day program immersed the middle schoolers in language with native-language instructors. They played games, tried new foods from the various cultures they were learning about and came together at the end in a performance for their friends and family.
STARTALK is a federal grant program sponsored by the National Security Agency. The three languages students were able to choose from for their target language were identified as critical languages.
Several students already planned to attend the division’s Global Studies and World Languages Academy at Tallwood. Even if they were not planning to attend the academy, the program sparked an interest in going deeper into the languages and cultures they spent part of their summer learning about.
Hortatio Segalas, a rising eighth-grader at Great Neck Middle, studied Chinese this summer. The students in his class learned about calligraphy and the 13-year-old said that was his favorite part because it is “a special type of writing.”
Though he said getting up on stage with the entire Chinese class was a bit stressful, it was also fun. Dozens of students sang in Mandarin, danced with little drums, ribbons and fans.
The Arabic students read a poem, singing their new language skills, and the Russian students danced and sang as well. It was all a “snippet” of what they had learned over the summer, Arble said.
The program has grown in the last 13 years the division has hosted it. It started out with just a few Chinese classes, and this was the first year Russian was offered as well.
Jie Lian, one of the Chinese teachers, has participated in the program every summer since it began. She said she comes back each year to help the students “open the world” and expand their perspective.
She tried to have the students use Chinese the entire time they were in class and taught them different cultural concepts.
First-year instructor Maria Grise, who taught Russian, liked to call the students “zvezdochki,” or little stars, because each student was a “little shining, rising, speaking star” learning more about the world and its cultures.
