The Modern Chinese School of Alberta actively participated in the 10th Chinese Teacher Training of the ASU Confucius Institute

Modern Chinese School of Alberta actively participated in the 10th Chinese Teacher Training of the ASU Confucius Institute. First of all, Fannie Tam, Executive Director of the Confucius Institute Madam to...

Early in the morning on January 13th, the first Sunday of the new semester, more than 100 principals, teaching supervisors, Chinese project leaders and teachers from the Confucius Institute, Confucius Classrooms in multiple public schools in the United States, and Chinese schools gathered in the lecture hall of the Arizona State University Center. They gathered here to participate in the 10th POST-ACTFL CONFERNCE WORKSHOP Chinese Teacher Training of the Confucius Institute at Arizona State University. With the strong support of Chairman Tao Shicheng and Principal Yang Yilun, all Chinese teachers from Alberta Modern Chinese Schools attended the meeting, and two teachers who participated in the 2018 National Conference on Teaching Foreign Languages ​​(ACTFL) gave wonderful speeches and exchanged teaching experiences.

First of all, Ms. Fannie Tam, Executive Director of the Confucius Institute, delivered an opening speech to welcome all the teachers. Then the principals of two public schools who set up Confucius Classrooms introduced their Chinese teaching experience, teaching concepts and methods. Teacher Xie Wenjing from the Confucius Institute and teacher Wu Fang from Dongxi School District who attended the annual meeting gave concise explanations on teaching methods respectively.

Different from the past, the Confucius Institute arranged many lively and interesting projects for this training. Professor Xu Wu, a qigong master from China, led everyone to stand up after listening to the lecture for more than two hours, and taught everyone a set of qigong movements for fitness and health. Teacher Xu patiently coached each move, and all the teachers studied hard, so that the fatigue after sitting for a long time was gone. I saw many teachers taking off their coats one after another and conscientiously completing one action after another with the teacher. The atmosphere at the scene was very warm. I thanked the Confucius Institute for providing the teachers with fitness exercise opportunities.

In order to reflect the school-running characteristics of combining Chinese teaching and the dissemination of Chinese culture, the Confucius Institute also specially invited Mr. Zhou, a folk calligrapher, to write the Chinese characters "福" and Spring Festival couplets for the teachers on the spot, and gave them to the teachers through a lottery. The teachers took photos with the big red characters "福", creating a joyful New Year atmosphere.

Teachers An Ran and Zeng Yinghua from the Alberta Modern Chinese School gave training speeches at the meeting on behalf of our school. The title of Teacher An Ran’s speech is: Apply the Skills to Interpret the Readings. Teacher An helps students learn and deepen their memory through graded teaching and training of Character Level, Word Level, Sentence Level characters, words and sentences. In the speech, Teacher An listed the parts, radicals, consonants and other methods and forms of Chinese characters used in teaching to help students understand and remember. After listening to his speech, the teachers were deeply impressed by Teacher An. His teaching is conscientious and conscientious.

Teacher Zeng Yinghua from Modern Chinese School explained the application of Chinese cultural elements in Chinese teaching through the topic of "The Encounter between Language and Culture" and combined with vivid and interesting pictures. Teacher Zeng explained the long history of Chinese culture and the origin of customs and proverbs through many materials. Examples of Chinese food, Chinese traditional festivals, Chinese costumes, etc. are listed, which are very vivid and vividly used in Chinese teaching.

This seminar, for the first time, added the award ceremony of the "Chinese "Oscar" Micro Video Competition, in addition to teachers sharing their experiences from participating in the annual meeting and teaching exchanges. Twenty-five awards from more than a hundred entries were announced at the meeting. Each award-winning contestant walked onto the red carpet, happily received the trophy from the award-giving teacher and delivered an enthusiastic acceptance speech. What is interesting is that the teachers on site selected the best video award through mobile phone voting. According to the host, the Chinese video competition has been held for 5 consecutive years, with the number of parameters increasing year by year, and the level of participating videos increasingly reflecting the Chinese proficiency of participating students, especially non-Chinese students. The Best Work Award, Best Original Award, Best Adaptation Award, Best Music Editing Award, Best Screenplay Award, and Winner Award fully reflect the students' enthusiasm for learning and creativity.

The participating teachers took group photos in a warm, joyful and peaceful atmosphere. Through the exchange of teaching experience, teachers have benefited a lot and can learn from each other's strengths in future teaching to continuously improve their teaching level and quality. Thank you to the Confucius Institute for providing you with a platform for learning and exchange. I wish that the broad and profound Chinese culture will go to the world. I hope that everyone will work together to make the prospect of spreading Chinese culture even better.

Written by: Alberta Modern Chinese School Lu Lihua

Photographed by: Alberta Modern Chinese School Zhao Tao