New Trends in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language: Introduction

Abstract

This section introduction describes the common themes of the seven chapters included in the volume “New Trends in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language.” Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (TCFL) emerged as an interdisciplinary field of study in the 1980s and early 1990s in both the Chinese speaking world and the United States. In the past three decades, the field has undergone exponential growth which is manifested in a drastic increase in the number of Chinese language learners worldwide as well as rapid progress made in the research area of Chinese language pedagogy. This chapter identifies three new trends of learner needs in the TCFL field, namely, “starting young” 低龄化, “reaching high” 高级化, and “more-diverse and individualized needs” 多样化个别化. To address these emerging learning needs, the TCFL field must innovate its teaching practices to apply the most recent findings in related research disciplines and design new curricula that would reflect learners’ interests. The seven chapters included in this volume report the most up-to-date findings in four research areas – teacher training, instructional technology, assessment, and curriculum and instructional design. The collective wisdom shared by all of these articles is that TCFL is a field in which pedagogical theories must be translated into actual, effective, and efficient classroom practice. The more prepared our teachers and the better designed and streamlined our curricula, the shorter the time required for students to start from zero background in Chinese and proceed to reaching the truly advanced level.