Press Release – February 1, 2012:
For more information please contact Superintendent Dr. Rocco Tomazic
rtomazic@linden.k12.nj.us or call 1-908-486-2800
Dr. Rocco Tomazic would like to extend an invitation to everyone to attend the official opening of the Confucius Classroom
Linden High School located at 121 W. St. Georges Ave. will officially open its Confucius Classroom with a plaque unveiling ceremony in the school auditorium on Wednesday, February 8, 2012. The ceremony will start at 10:00am and will be followed by a reception and tour of the classroom. Faculty and staff from the supervising Confucius Institute at Rutgers University will be in attendance, along with other local dignitaries.
The Confucius Institute at Rutgers University promotes quality Chinese language and culture education, and serves as a resource center for Chinese studies in New Jersey. The Confucius Institute at Rutgers was formed in partnership with Jilin University in China, with the support from the Office of Chinese Language Council International (Hanban).
Linden High School and Xiamen Foreign Language School in Xiamen China are partner high schools and joint Confucius Classrooms under the Confucius Institute at Rutgers University. Together they have carried on a host of activities including joint student exchanges, teacher training in China and the United States, as well as hosting joint exchanges of educators. The Linden Public Schools is also a model district for the use of the Great Wall Chinese Program in the United States, an educational program endorsed by Hanban.
The Linden Public School District is in its fifth year of teaching Chinese, providing instruction at all levels from grades 1 to 12, including the high school International Baccalaureate Program. Twenty-five percent of the students in grades 1 through 12 are currently studying Chinese, which represents nearly 975 students. There are four Chinese teachers in the district.
The unveiling ceremony will feature the Linden High School Chinese dragon teams and Chinese lions from the school’s Navy Junior ROTC unit. The Chinese drum team from the school’s band will also be present. Linden High School recently held its celebration ceremony for Chinese New Year during the visit of twenty-six visiting Chinese high school students from the Xiamen Foreign Language School and Fuzhou High School No. 3 of Fujian Province, China.
Activities of the Confucius Classroom are fully funded through grants from Hanban. Future activities will include support for the teaching of Chinese in the schools, assisting with cultural celebrations and student-to-student Chinese-American exchanges. There is also an initiative planned to conduct free Chinese classes in the evening for adults.

The Linden Public School district has signed an official agreement with The Office of Chinese Language Council International (Hanban) for Linden to be a model K-12 school district for the new Great Wall Chinese instructional program. Linden is the first model Great Wall Chinese K-12 school district in the United States. Two Great Wall Chinese Center teachers have already visited the district to set up the computer support and student accounts necessary to implement the program.
Great Wall Chinese is a new Chinese teaching and learning system based on cutting- edge network and multimedia technology. Great Wall Chinese mixes direct instruction with courseware technology, and uses a new management system for teachers to electronically monitor student progress over the Internet.
As part of the agreement, the Linden Public School district has already conducted its first workshop for Chinese teachers from around the Northeast held on October 22, 2011. The workshop attracted Chinese teachers from New Jersey, New York and Delaware. Attendees were introduced to the Great Wall Chinese system, andGreat Wall Chinese- trained teachers then demonstrated the various techniques using Linden students at the high school and middle school level.
The Linden Public School District is now in its fifth year of teaching Chinese, providing instruction at all levels from grades 1 to 12, including the high school International Baccalaureate Program. The district has over 6,000 students with 4,773 in grades 1 to 12. Of those students, 25%, or 1,195, are studying Chinese.
The Linden Public School District is designated as a model district for Bilingual and ESL education by the New Jersey Department of Education. The District teaches six world languages including Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian and Chinese. At the high school level, students regularly participate in exchange visits to the language country of origin, and host return visits to Linden. Linden High School has a formal partnership with the Xiamen Foreign Language School in Xiamen, China. Students from Linden have visited Xiamen three times, and students from Xiamen have visited Linden twice. Mutual exchange visits are again scheduled for this school year.
Quality Education for All
1Great Wall Chinese is a systematic curriculum divided into entrance, primary, intermediate and advanced stages. Great Wall Chinese includes comprehensive Chinese, the main course, as well as core communicative courses, resource courses and skills training. The program integrates learning, administration, testing, resources, and a virtual community.
Great Wall Chinese provides support and service to learning, academic research and administration for all learners, tutors and Chinese teaching institutes. The online courseware creates a flexible time schedule, a voice recognition system to refine pronunciation, and classroom tutorials to meet individual needs. The computerized learning management system monitors the entire teaching and learning process.
“The Great Wall Chinese partnership is extremely important for Linden,” states Rocco Tomazic, Linden’s Superintendent of Schools. “It allows us to implement a state-of-the- art teaching program in our district at minimal cost, while providing quality support for our students over the Internet as they study and practice Chinese at home.”
The study of Chinese as a world language in Linden, a city with few heritage Chinese residents, grew from a 2007 visit to China by Mrs. Alphonsina Paternostro, Linden’s Supervisor of World Languages/Bilingual/ESL. Mrs. Paternostro attended the government sponsored “China Bridge” tour in 2007 visiting with key governmental and educational leaders seeking to promote the study of Chinese in the United States.
The following year, Rocco Tomazic, then Linden’s Assistant Superintendent, traveled to China on the 2008 “China Bridge”. It was on that visit that the initial contacts were made with Xiamen Foreign Language School that eventually culminated in a formal exchange partnership. Then Linden Superintendent Mr. Joseph E. Martino authorized the expansion of the Chinese program and appointed Ms. JuPing Chen as a Program Advisor to help guide the program forward.
Great Wall Chinese has taken five years to develop and has been used for Chinese teaching in 15 colleges and universities in China. Over 80 college Confucius Institutes around the world have applied for account numbers for the Internet version or for the stand-alone CD version. Great Wall Chinese has released its network version in English, Korean and French, as well as its stand-alone CD version in English and French. Network versions in Spanish, German, Japanese, Russian, and Thai are currently under development.
The Great Wall Chinese program consists of eighteen levels and covers three development stages of language learning – surviving communication, expanding communication and free communication. Great Wall Chinese popularizes survival communication as a learning objective so that the learners achieve the primary level in listening, speaking and reading. The content of Great Wall Chinese is embedded in the multimedia software of language teaching. The products cover Internet, local area network, stand-alone CD version and printed teaching materials.
In January 2009 Dr. Rocco Tomazic became the Superintendent of Schools in Linden and pushed forward with the expansion of the Chinese program, including supervising the first exchange visit of Linden students to Xiamen in April 2009. Annual visits to
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Xiamen followed in 2010 and 2011. Xiamen students visited Linden in the summer of 2010 and in February 2011. Linden High School and Xiamen Foreign Language School made a joint application to The Office of Chinese Language Council International (Hanban) to become Confucius Classrooms under the guidance of the Confucius Institute at Rutgers University. Approval has been obtained and the grand opening of the Linden High School Confucius Classroom is being planned.
The decision by the Linden Public Schools to initiate the teaching of Chinese has been guided by the U.S. Department of State National Security Language Initiative for Youth, which advocates K-12 language instruction in critical languages including Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), Korean, Russian, Hindi, Persian and Turkish.
“Linden is a diverse community with a clear educational vision for our students’ future. Global understanding is a critical skill to learn in school and mastering it should serve our students well in their future,” says Mrs. Alphonsina Paternostro, Supervisor of World Languages/ESL/Bilingual. Mrs. Paternostro was recently honored by the New Jersey Principals and Supervisors Association, earning an award as the Visionary Supervisor of the Year for 2011.
Involvement with the Great Wall Chinese initiative marks a positive step to improve the teaching and learning of Chinese in the district. Linden currently has four Chinese teachers and all have taken advantage of free training provided by Hanban in China and the United States. Selected Linden Chinese teachers and Linden’s Chinese Program Advisor traveled to China in November 2010 and again in June 2011 for free training sponsored by Hanban and Beijing Normal University. It was at these sessions that interest in the Great Wall Chinese program was developed.
Fascinated with the Great Wall Chinese program speech recognition capability, handwriting character recognition technology and the combination of multimedia teaching materials, Great Wall Chinese seemed a natural approach for Linden. Working as a team with other teachers associated with the Rutgers Confucius Institute, the team from New Jersey won two prizes at the June 2011 Beijing conference for Best Power Point and Best Creativity in using the Great Wall Chinesesystem.
This proficiency in using the Great Wall Chinese program caught the eye of Beijing Normal University professor Dr. Song Jihua, the head developer of the Great Wall Chinese program. Discussion between Dr. Song and Ms. Chen, Linden’s Program Advisor, developed the idea that Linden would be an ideal learning environment to further test the Great Wall Chinese program in the United States.
The technology of Great Wall Chinese shows a language environment through characters, situations and talk topics by using flash animation, and by combining speech recognition technology into Chinese character recognition technology. It provides a strong system for teacher-student interactivity. Its training patterns encompass overall understanding of language, reading imitation, recording comparison and simulating communication. The product cover 973 Chinese characters, more than 1,300 words, 156 grammar points, 240 scenes, 262 key points of communication, all distributed throughout the 60 units and 180 lessons.
In the management of teaching, the Great Wall Chinese program provides a system of to support the teacher and a student’s learning. On the Internet version, whenever
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registered users are logged on, the students can complete all teaching tasks arranged by a teacher, and students are able to get teacher guidance online.
The Chinese Multimedia Workshop conducted on October 22, 2011 in Linden marked a key cooperative effort. Combining resources from the Linden Public Schools, the Linden High School Confucius Classroom, the Great Wall Chinese Center and Hanban, the workshop took advantage of the two visiting Great Wall Chinese teachers to introduce the Great Wall Chinese program to area Chinese teachers. Mr. Ke Yonghong and Ms. Chang Hongling presented the features of the Great Wall Chinese program.
During the second part of the workshop, Great Wall Chinese-trained teachers Ms. Tsun- Ju Lin of Lawrence High School (Lawrenceville, NJ) taught a demonstration lesson with high levels of teacher-student interaction using Linden students. Later Ms. Liang Yin (Celia) Liu of The College of New Jersey presented material on how to use digital teaching tools to link classroom and after-school language learning. She encouraged participants not to be satisfied with traditional teaching methods, but to make full use of computers, mobile phones, Facebook and other media. Hanban officially sanctioned the workshop as an authorized Great Wall Chinese training event. Approximately thirty teachers from New Jersey, New York and Delaware attended the workshop.
Linden has greatly benefited from its association with Hanban, the Great Wall Chinese Center, and Xiamen Foreign Language School. Hanban has provided thousands of dollars in free educational materials in each of the eleven schools in Linden. By being designated a model Great Wall Chinese district, Linden has obtained over $15,000 worth of educational hardware and software free of charge, together with the services of highly trained specialists from China that has provided high quality professional development at no cost. The association with Xiamen Foreign Language School has allowed Linden students a safe and secure environment to interact with Chinese students and experience Chinese culture first hand.
As a key project of the Office of Chinese Language Council International (Hanban), Great Wall Chinese is the core textbook used in Confucius Institutes.
“In these tough economic times, public school districts are challenged to do more with less,” says Linden Superintendent Rocco Tomazic. “Great Wall Chinese is a perfect example of how a school system can partner with outside organizations to obtain high quality support at low cost, all with the object of significantly helping students move confidently into their future.”