Students couldn't go to China -- so teachers brought China to the students

At the beginning of this summer's Princeton in Beijing program, it was hard for students to forget that they were not in Beijing. By the end, it was hard to remember to speak English.

Students like Noelle Lyle '06 spoke English only at the supermarket. "Since I'd been speaking Chinese all week, I'd forget, and thank the clerk in Chinese, and then I would stare at him, and he would just stare back at me," Lyle said.

This summer, PiB, the renowned language immersion program, unofficially became Princeton in Beijing in Princeton after it was moved from Beijing to the Princeton campus. Restrictions during the SARS outbreak prevented the students from traveling to China.

Numbers for the program dropped from 127 to 65 after the announcement of the move, but PiB picked up 14 additional students shortly after the announcement.

Despite initial worries that they would miss out by not being in Beijing, students and teachers alike were pleased with the results of this summer's PiB courses.

"Nobody can reproduce Beijing in New Jersey," said the program's co-director Perry Link. "But the teaching was as good if not better than in Beijing."

Creating the illusion

The program had to resort to some creative methods to cultivate a total immersion environment. Besides offering extracurriculars like taiji quan (shadowboxing), calligraphy, Chinese chess, and ethnic Chinese dance, the program assigned teachers to live in Spelman quads with students.

The 79 PiB students and more than 20 teachers occupied four buildings of Spelman — one building for each language level.

"We just became family," said Jean Su '05, who took fifth year Chinese this summer. "There were nine of us, plus our three teachers. Because we weren't in Beijing, we really coalesced."

Link said the program went to great lengths to keep the number of class hours, the student to teacher ratio — roughly four to one — and the tuition the same as when the program is in Beijing.

The cost of hiring instructors and renting the Princeton classrooms and dorms is significantly more expensive in Princeton than in Beijing. Link estimated that the program, which is a financial organization independent from the University, lost $80 thousand to $100 thousand — over $1,000 per student.

Co-director of PiB and Chinese department head Chih-ping Chou said they decided to go through with it "to serve the needs of our students."

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"I'm happy that we did it, and that we did it well," Chou concluded.

No distractions

While students lamented the lack of air conditioning in Spelman and missed authentic Chinese cuisine, many were enthusiastic about their progress and the program overall.

"Because [PiB] wasn't set in Beijing, the people who came were the ones who really wanted to learn Chinese," Wendy Xu '06 said.

Some teachers reported that because the program was in Princeton, students actually did better in the classroom. Princeton Professor Joane Chiang, a PiB instructor, said that when students are in Beijing, the city's many distractions can make going to class a chore, especially during the last two weeks.

"When the students are in Princeton, however, that just doesn't happen," Chiang said.

Students in the program say they did four to six hours of homework each day, in addition to signing the language pledge, which required them to speak Chinese at all times, with only a few exceptions — such as ordering food in a restaurant.

Link said the language pledge was less successful this year than in other years, in part because of the English-speaking environment.

Link reported a similar "problem" for some of the PiB students who took classes in one of the Wilson School buildings.

"One of the facilities administrators there wrote me an email and said that there was a 'serious problem.' The email said, your female students went into the men's bathroom. And I said, well, they've signed the language pledge, and in Chinese men spells 'door,' so it's no wonder they went in," Link joked, reemphasizing the program's emphasis on "total immersion."