FORTVILLE – Students learning Mandarin at Mt. Vernon High School have developed new friendships with students from schools in Taipei, Taiwan, thanks to the class pen pal project.
This is the eighth school year of students writing letters, and there is hope this year that local students will meet several of their Taiwan friends when they visit the U.S. this spring.
This April, 16 students from Taipei Neihu Senior High School will visit Fortville, attending the high school and shadowing students that they’ve been writing to.
It’ll be a fun culmination of a program to make in-person connections with pen pals.
“One of my favorite parts of working on the pen pal activity is that students get to make a friend from another country and learn from a person around their age,” teacher Yi-Fan Lin said in a press release.
MVHS Mandarin teacher Lin has been incorporating numerous creative international activities to help engage her students in learning.
Before teaching at MVHS, Lin was an English teacher in Taiwan. When starting the pen pal program with her MVHS students, she was able to reach out to English teachers in Taiwan for exchanges at several high schools there.
The pen pal letters provide hands-on learning for students at MVHS learning Mandarin, as well as students in Taiwan learning English. MVHS students can improve their Mandarin while helping their new Taiwanese friends improve their English.
Students are assigned one or two pen pals in Taiwan, depending on class sizes. While MVHS classes average 25 students, in Taiwan there can be around 40 students.
The students will start by filming a video introduction in class and share their name, grade, and then a fun fact in the language they are learning. The purpose of starting this way is to help the students put a face to a name, as well as serve as an opportunity to begin a personal friendship.
Next, the students write their letters in Mandarin on one side and English on the other. This is to help ensure understanding while learning the language. The first letters sent are introductions about themselves, including their interests and high school activities.
Mt. Vernon students are able to realize that students in Taiwan experience many of the same things they experience.
“The most enjoyable part about writing pen pal letters was getting to look into the everyday lives of my pen pals in Taiwan,” said junior Reagan Britt. “It allowed me to practice Mandarin in a new way and get more comfortable with it.”
The pen pal activity is only offered to students in classes Mandarin II and III; it gives students in Mandarin I something to look forward to.
After receiving their first letter, students will write a digital card to send to their pen pal. In the fall, MVHS students wrote a digital holiday card to their pen pals to help explain some of the American holidays.
Last year, one of Lin’s classes was able to set up a time to connect over Google Meet with the pen pal class in Taiwan. MVHS students joined the virtual connection at 8 p.m. due to the time difference between the two countries. They logged in to Google Meet from home, while in Taiwan, the students were at school in the early morning.
Because MVHS Mandarin classes only last a semester, it typically only leaves enough time for one letter to be sent and one letter to be received through the mail. Lin wishes her students could send more letters but international mail and time differences between the two countries can cause challenges for frequent video conferencing.
Senior Annelise Hiner said she enjoys seeing the world through the lens of a student from Taiwan.
“It was really interesting getting to learn about their culture and some of the things we had in common,” she said. “We were so different, yet so alike, in numerous ways.”
