International Chinese Language Teaching at A Crossroads: The Case of France

At present, the questions on the establishment of international classes in foreign languages or of international section of basic education schools, the diversification of foreign language teaching, the spread of foreign language proficiency standards, or even the definition of what constitutes an international language, arise from the global mobility of people as one of the major features of 21st century society. Learning more than two foreign languages and how to achieve autonomy in all aspects of foreign language skills has become a demand of the international community. International courses in foreign languages are clearly one of the channels of greatest interest to the educational community. Chinese language teaching in France is known for its uniqueness and leadership in the field of teaching Chinese as a foreign language. Bilingual teaching, as one of the forms of Chinese language teaching, particularly highlights the importance of teaching methods. There are two models of bilingual teaching in France today: the official model and the association model. The purpose of this paper is to explore the background, current status, content and characteristics of the first model of bilingual classes, as well as the pedagogical reflections that they bring upon. This article is dedicated to the French International Chinese Language Class created in 2008, its teaching model, pedagogical features and strategies. An important feature of this course is the introduction of Chinese language and literature and the teaching of non-verbal subjects (mathematics) in Chinese. The integration of non-linguistic subjects into foreign language teaching is a model of teaching that was developed in Western Europe in the 1990s, which has been widely acknowledge by the educational community and is very popular among learners. How compatible this model is with the characteristics of the Chinese language is also an issue to be explored in this paper.

Keywords

French Chinese bilingual education CLIL Model Chinese International Classes in France

source

International Journal of Chinese Language Education; Jun 2020; Issue No. 7; p.1 - 16

Publisher

Department of Chinese Language Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong
Chinese Language Program, Columbia University
Chung Hwa Book Co. (H.K.) Ltd.

Language

Chinese

ISSN

2520-7733 (Print); 2521-4241 (Online)