Annual Report (2004)

British Chinese Language Teaching Seminar

Song Lianyi

School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

British Chinese Language Teaching Seminar (BCLTS) have a membership of over 50 teachers of Chinese from over 20 British universities and institutions.

BCLTS committee, which was elected in August 2002, will continue to serve till August 2004. The committee members are:

             Dr SONG Lianyi, Chairman (SOAS)

            Ms YU Feixia, Co-ordinator (University of Central Lancashire)

     Ms FANG Jing, Treasurer (Oxford)

            Dr CHEN Lili and Dr ZHANG Xiaoling, Newsletter Editors, (Sheffield & Nottingham)

Our advisory panel members are Mr Stephen (Shouqiang) Ding (FCO), Professor Glen Dudbridge (Oxford), Dr Don Starr (Durham), Mr Ping-cheng T’ung and Dr Po-ching Yip. 

In response to an initiation from the National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, China, commonly known as Hanban, BCLTS organised a conference on Chinese language teaching in Europe, which was held on 2-3 April 2004 at SOAS and was attended by 46 colleagues. Amongst these participants, seven were from European institutions.  

15 people gave presentations at the conference and the topics covered were:

1   European & international cooperation

2   Chinese grammar

3   Computer and multimedia in Chinese language teaching   

4   Teaching Mandarin to Cantonese speakers       

5   Visual aids in Chinese Language Teaching

During the conference, informal exchanges with European colleagues led to the common understanding that Europe-wide cooperation in establishing a framework for and research in Chinese language teaching would benefit us all. We wish to organise similar conferences in Europe in the future.

Participants found the conference most informative and beneficial. Members of BCLTS particularly felt that the use of computers and multimedia was increasingly becoming an integral part of language teaching and, as a result, training for all language teachers has become necessary. It is therefore decided that our next seminar in September will be devoted to computer assisted teaching.

BCLTS would like to take this opportunity to thank both Hanban and University China Committee in London for their generous financial grants.

BCLTS will seek to establish links with other organisations including UK Association for the Promotion of Chinese Education, UK Federation of Chinese Schools, and the British Association for Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language, etc. in order to promote Chinese language teaching and research in the UK.

Our website remains to be www.ctcfl.ox.ac.uk/clts/aboutus.htm, which is maintained and updated by Mr Kan Shio-yun at Oxford.  

Song Lianyi

Chairman of BCLTS     (2004)