GCI Rounded Off the Online Interactive Course on Chinese Grammar Teaching

Gepubliseerd op 04.06.2021

On the morning of 29 May 2021, the Groningen Confucius Institute (GCI) successfully completed the online interactive course on Chinese grammar teaching. The course, titled A Usage-based communicative approach to explicit teaching of Chinese grammar: why, how, when and what?  started on 12 March and consisted of 10 two-hour sessions, attracting Chinese teachers from the Netherlands, the UK, China, Japan and Belgium.

Teaching grammar lies at the core of teaching international Chinese. The most prominent characteristic of Chinese grammar is its lack of restricted morphological change, which underlines the complexity of Chinese grammar teaching. The course was specially designed for Chinese language teachers and explored this key teaching point of grammar. The course was given by Dr. Zhu Zhu, a PhD graduate in Translation Studies and Lecturer in Interpreting and Language Acquisition at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, who has extensive experience in teaching the Chinese language and teacher training. During the course, Dr. Zhu Zhu presented several examples from her own classroom and covered topics like how to start the Chinese course for beginners, how to build the language sense for students through teaching the 被（bei） construction and the 把（ba）construction, how to choose proper teaching methods based on the age of students and how to seize the right moment to start teaching the grammar.

Dr. Zhu Zhu, giving her online interactive course

During the roundtable discussion after the course, participant teachers to the course shared positive feedback and their own experience in teaching Chinese grammar. They indicated how much they had gained from the course and were able to resolve some tricky points in teaching Chinese grammar. Teachers said that even though they could not meet each other physically, the online course provided a precious opportunity for exchange with each other.

GCI holds Chinese language teacher training annually, aiming at providing professional support for Chinese teachers in the Netherlands and creating a great platform for teachers to interact. This online interactive course is a successful new offering in the field of Chinese teacher training from GCI, which will continue its cooperation with experts in the field of international Chinese language teaching and organise professional teacher training in the near future.