Teaching Chinese to International Students in China: Political Rhetoric and Ground Realities
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Teaching Chinese to International Students in China: Political Rhetoric and Ground Realities Weihong Wang1 · Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen2
Published online: 30 September 2016 © The Author(s) 2016. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract This paper presents an on-going study of the enactment of The International Promotion of Chinese Policy (国际汉语推广政策). It explores how Chinese teaching and learning take place in a Chinese university under the Study in China Programme which allows international students, after a period of intensive Chinese language learning, to transfer to academic courses taught in Chinese for Chinese students at the tertiary level. This programme has expanded in recent years in response to the government’s goal to enhance China’s soft power globally. By studying policy documents, engaging in conversations with students and teachers and observing classrooms, our study reveals that there are conflicting interests of social actors at national, institutional and individual levels, causing considerable conflicts and tensions in three aspects: (1) the divergent goals of internationalisation between the government and the higher education institution; (2) the imperative need of academic Chinese for subject learning and the actual offer of Chinese for everyday communication and (3) the competing role of English versus Chinese as a lingua franca for international students in the university setting. These conflicts make it difficult for international students to benefit from the subject courses, and for universities to implement successful language programmes for international students, and this & Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen [email protected] Weihong Wang [email protected] 1
School of Foreign Studies, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430074, Hubei, China
2
Institute of Education, University of Reading, 4 Redlands Road, Reading, Berkshire RG1 5EX, UK
renders the political objective of this programme difficult to achieve. Keywords International students · Study in China · The International Promotion of Chinese Policy
Introduction Chinese globalisation has been the topic of much scholarly work in the recent years (Fallon 2014; Tsung and Cruickshank 2011). Indeed, China’s intensified effort to popularise Chinese (Putonghua mainly) in the last few decades has yielded some daunting statistics, in particular, with two Chinese promotion programmes—Confucius Institutes (CIs) and The Study in China Programme (SiCP). In this study, we focus on The Study in China Programme. As an internal promotion programme, SiCP has been established to attract international students to study in China (MOE 2010a, b). Connected with China’s broader foreign policy goals, the SiCP allows international students, after a period (1 or 2 years) of intensive Chinese language learning, to transfer to academic courses taught in Chinese at the tertiary level. According to the Ministry of Education, the number of international students studying in China has risen sharpl
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