Conference Summary
The 6th International Conference on Chinese Language Pedagogy
August 3-5, 2007, Najing, P.R., China

Yi Xu
PhD Candidate
Second Language Acquisition and Teaching GIDP

In the summer of 2007, I attended the 6th International Conference on Chinese Language Pedagogy, which is also the First International Conference on Teaching Chinese to American Students. The increasing popularity of learning Chinese throughout the world, particularly in America, calls for international scholarly exchanges regarding researches on the language itself as well as on innovations and reforms of pedagogy, and this conference addresses this urgent need. While the conference was held in Nanjing, China, I was surprised that among the 200 scholars/teachers who attended it, more than half of them were from countries other than China, with most of them coming from America.

The “international” environment of this conference made it particularly effective and interesting. Although a Chinese citizen myself, I received my graduate degree in M.A. at University of Arizona, and my graduate studies involve around linguistic theories within a Western tradition, focusing on Chomsky’s Government and Binding theories, corpus linguistics, etc. On the conference, I presented my paper, which is a case study on an important Chinese sentence structure, “shi…de”. I realized on the conference that many traditional Chinese scholars were not familiar with the concept of corpus research or theoretical linguistics but were highly interested in it. I felt very excited because I was able to introduce new ideas to the conference, to some extent breaking the domestic tradition of Chinese linguistics, which is almost purely descriptive.

I also benefited greatly from the conference because of many veteran teachers’ contributions to the conference. Most of the attendees have multiple years’ of teaching experience in China or overseas. I was particularly interested in the comparison of standard Chinese as a foreign/second language tests in China and in America. In America, the standard test is referred to as AP Chinese test, while the standard test in China is the HSK test. These tests are to some extent comparable to the TOEFL test to learners of English. Dr. Yao, a distinguished Chinese linguist from University of Hawaii, concluded in the conference that the HSK test is a lot more mature in terms of test design than the AP test because of the many years’ of experience and reform. However, the AP test is more advanced in integrating technologies. We certainly look forward to the advent of a standard Chinese language test that can be popularized throughout the world.

The conference also centers on materials design and language software applications. These are also areas of my interest. For instance, computer-assisted language learning has caught foreign language teachers’ attention in America long time ago. Chinese language software development, however, has just begun and its improvement impinges on better pedagogy, more researches in second language acquisition of Chinese, etc.

I also submitted my paper to the conference organizers, and the paper was published by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in Beijing in their collection of essays from the conference. I am indebted to the Herbert E. Carter Travel Fund from GIDP. Because I long to become a teacher of Chinese to speakers of other languages, this conference keeps me informed of the latest development of the field, and helps me acquainted with many world-known scholars. This experience is invaluable for my career development.