Chinese language teachers in British universities look for further development

World
Europe

As the popularity of the Chinese language grows, there is urgent need to improve the quality of Chinese teaching as a foreign language in the UK higher education sector, participants at an international conference agreed Wednesday.

The 16th International Conference on Teaching and Learning Chinese in Higher Education, organized by the British Chinese Language Teaching Society (BCLTS), attracted over 100 Chinese teaching and research professionals from the UK, Japan, US, Germany and Malaysia.

The three-day event, co-hosted by the School of Modern Languages, University of Warwick and the Confucius Institute at Coventry University, will discuss a range of topics on the uniqueness and the commonalities of teaching Chinese as a foreign language.

File of a Polish couple bringing their children to China to learn more about the Chinese culture. /VCG Photo

Figures released in the conference showed almost all the UK universities offer Chinese language courses with about 60,000 university students, but making the Chinese teaching system mainstream still faces big challenges.

Zhang Xinsheng, vice president of European Association of Chinese Teaching, said there are already efforts to improve the quality of teaching Chinese in the UK, but there are challenges in resources and sustainability, teacher supply and training, standards and assessment.

"UK will face even more challenges in its language teaching after the Brexit," he suggested, "I think Chinese teaching professionals in the UK also need to have an umbrella organization and a single voice to work together with other languages..."

Foreign students studying in China dance at a school event in Nanjing city, Jiangsu Province. /VCG Photo

The BCLTS is an academic organization whose full members and associate members represent teachers of Chinese in higher education institutions and other sectors. Its main objective is to improve the teaching of the Chinese language in Britain by means of exchange ideas, information and materials in Chinese learning, teaching and research.

The BCLTS was founded in 1997 in Oxford. Its members have been playing an increasingly important role in teaching Chinese language in British universities where Chinese is offered as degree and as an optional course.

Source(s): Xinhua News Agency