The new era is a period in history which is fraught with opportunities for the development of and poses great challenge to International Chinese Education both as a profession and an academic discipline, for which adaptations should be made accordingly. The pressures brought about by the changes in the environment and policies on its survival spur an objective, rational and discreet analysis, which is of paramount importance for us to rethink about the resources, problems and challenges related to the dual qualities of International Chinese Education both as a profession and an academic discipline, and this reflection should be conducted from the perspectives of history, development and progress. In this study, a driving model is advanced to deal with what is described above. The initial implication we draw upon from the model shows that the advantage resulting from the dual qualities is obvious, and great progress has been made in this area. However, due to overemphasis placed on the profession, the academic discipline of International Chinese Education has only shown a superficial prosperity, resulting in some problems such as weak awareness, blurring nature, and inaccurate discipline positioning. Therefore, this study proposes the following suggestions: firstly, proceeding from the real situation, we should judge the achievements and mistakes in a scientific and systematic way; secondly, we should have an open mind and try to gain a deeper understanding of the state will and its strategies; thirdly, in accordance with the law governing the development of an academic discipline, we should value the contribution of scholars and institutions of higher education; fourthly, we should try to promote the progress of International Chinese Education by strengthening its educational function; finally, with the aim of professional training in mind, we should try to promote the reform of the organizational structure through a top-down implementation.
The mode of international spread of Chinese language has been transforming from teaching international students in China to sending Chinese language teachers to different countries for the purpose of promoting Chinese language and culture. This paper presents a new model of training teachers and teacher trainers in a dynamic setting based on the new conceptual framework of teacher training (APLUS). This new framework is situated in non-Chinese contexts where Chinese is a foreign language as opposed to Chinese as a second language. By bringing theory into practice, this framework focuses on the applied side of the training as well as the linkage between cultures. Within this framework, a training model (5P) was designed based on two sets of data: An online survey among guest teachers in the United States, and a follow-up fi eld study. This model brings together teacher trainees and teacher trainers to engage in the analysis of authentic cases in classroom management, intercultural communication, and methods of teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages (TCSOL).
The structure and operation of Confucius Institute (CI), as an organization promoting Chinese language and culture,have attracted much scholarship in recent years. Based on research papers revolving the themes of CI published from 2005 to 2017, this paper uses the visualization software CiteSpace to identify the key topics and disciplinary areas of CI studies. It is found that the key topics scoped into CI research include the Chinese language teaching in CI, the sustainable development of CI, the impact of CI on China’s soft power and public diplomacy, the economic and business functions of CI, and the issues of CI in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative. It reveals that the CI studies constitute a loose research area with multiple research focus and cross-disciplinary methodologies. For future CI studies, the author proposes that more academic endeavors from other disciplines should be made in order to conduct broader, more in-depth and more sustainable research in this field.
Entrepreneurs’ personal, professional and social values are key for the business to thrive. Under the background of carrying forward excellent entrepreneurship, it is of great practical signifi cance to correctly understand the value characteristics of contemporary Chinese entrepreneurs. Most existing researches on entrepreneur's values adopt self-report method, which is difficult to reveal the deep concept system. The investigation of metaphors in discourse can avoid the defense and concealment of information; meanwhile, the intertextuality analysis of the discourse of different subjects can explore the meaning and attitude shared by different subjects. This study attempts to combine metaphor and intertextuality to investigate the value system shared by entrepreneurs. Through the analysis of metaphor identifi cation, intertextuality identifi cation and intertextual metaphor interpretation, this study explores the value judgment of the discourse subject hidden by intertextual metaphor on entrepreneurial activities. This paper selects the corpus of about 270,000 words of 54 private entrepreneurs. Through the analysis of intertextual metaphor of corpus, it is found that diligence (persistence), creativity, competition, medium in power, low in wealth orientation, and low achievement, risk-taking and independence are the paramount values for Chinese entrepreneurs. The fi ndings are in contrast to the existing studies on the characteristics of Chinese entrepreneurs, such as low innovation, low competition and low power orientation, and the causes for such differences are discussed. This study demonstrates that intertextual metaphor analysis can be a useful method to explore the values of entrepreneurs, and entrepreneur discourse analysis is an effective approach to the study of entrepreneurs.
Mr. Lü Shuxiang (1904-1998), one of preeminents linguists and founders of modern Chinese linguistics, has left a rich scholarly legacy for the academia. What is well known is Mr. Lü’s rigorous and plain features of literary style. His life is his work and his work is for people. One aspect of it is that Mr. Lü Shuxiang has a unique and charming view of the academic writing: always keeping in mind and being considerate towards the ordinary readers. His writing of articles aims at serving readers and fostering their interest, being well understood by readers and striving to earn the trust of readers. He has showed genuine interest in language use by ordinary working people in society and devoted all his life to the cultural and educational cause of the people, and thus deems a truly great linguist and beloved teacher of the people.
This text reviews a recently published book Critical Sociolinguistic Research Methods: Studying Language Issues that Matter written by Canadian, Finnish and Catalan (Spain) authors (Monica Heller, Sari Pietikäinen and Joan Pujolar). From a disciplinary point of view all authors are sociolinguists in the broadest sense of the word, but when it comes to their approach to the relationship between language and society, we can also detect in their work features of linguistic anthropology and discourse analysis. In this review, I focus especially on the theoretical and methodological framework of critical sociolinguistics presented in the book. I appreciate the authors’ thorough approach in applying this framework even to their own work, in other words, their orientation to the principle of refl exivity. Further, I appreciate the authors’ exceptional sensitivity towards the linguistic,cultural, social and political diversity of the current world. I welcome the authors’ focus on ethnography and value their conceptualization of the research process as a fi ve-phase process, the individual phases of which are related through the principle of recursivity and rhizome.