Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2013
Abstract
The Confucius Institute (CI) network is a key project in China’s recent campaign to promote Chinese language and culture education internationally. This study focused on the CIs in the United States (U.S.) and investigated their effort to achieve this goal. The re-sults of a survey questionnaire based on 24 U.S. CIs showed that these institutes primarily focused on Chinese language teaching, teacher education, academic and cultural events. Meanwhile, the areas of teaching material development, language assessment, Chinese program development and evaluation were underdeveloped. Qualitative interviews with four focal CIs further revealed that the CIs were able to adjust to their respective local en-vironments and to involve the local community in their operations. They developed crea-tive ways to cope with a shortage of qualified teachers, teaching methods, and teaching materials that has constrained the international promotion of Chinese language and culture. Localization is considered a key to success and sustainability of the CIs. Therefore, the current top-down CI evaluation performed by Hanban should be improved to better identify the CIs’ achievements.
Recommended Citation
Li, Shuai and Tucker, G. Richard, "A survey of the U.S. Confucius Institutes: Opportunities and challenges in promoting Chinese language and culture education" (2013). World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications. 76.
https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/mcl_facpub/76
Comments
Author accepted manuscript version of an article published by John Benjamin's Publishing in:
Li, S., & Tucker, G. R. (2013). A survey of the U.S. Confucius Institutes: Opportunities and challenges in promoting Chinese language and culture education. Journal of Chinese Language Teachers’ Association, 48(1), 29-53.