Learning Chinese in Vietnam: The Role of the Confucius Institute

Southeast Asian countries have always been one of the priority regions of the Chinese foreign policy due both to the geographic proximity and to the long historical and cultural connections and new forms of economic and trade cooperation which have been formed on that basis. Vietnam supports close interaction with its northern neighbour not only in the Party matters, but also in the trade and economic, agricultural, tourism, educational, medical, and other spheres. Naturally, this suggests intense learning of the Chinese language on a large scale. China, in its turn, is interested in maintenance and increase of its positive image among the countries of Southeast Asia. That is why China applies various methods and tools of nonforce pressure, which are known as cultural soft power. One of these tools is the Confucius Institute (Classes). China considered it the site of promotion of the Chinese language and Chinese culture abroad. From the outside, Vietnam and China appear to move toward each other in the matter of teaching and learning Chinese, but the reality shows that the Vietnamese side is not hastening to join the Chinese initiative, striving to control the situation, and does not let the Chinese side expand the Confucius Institutes network in Vietnam. Also, the analysis of the situation has shown the insignificant role of the Confucius Institutes in teaching the Chinese language.

DEVELOPMENT WITH CHARACTERISTICS AND INNOVATION – CONFUCIUS INSTITUTE AT LBUS

The research is on how to manage language teaching and culture promotion effectively through building explicit characteristics and seeking for innovative development of the program for the purpose of mutual understanding and common prosperity, taking Confucius Institute of Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu (LBUS) as an example. A brief introduction of the overall development of Chinese teaching program in the world and specifically in Romania will be conducted in the first part of the thesis. And then, characteristics of C.I. at LBUS in teaching and culture promotion will be discussed with detailed elaboration and progresses especially in the past five years. In the third part, some innovative ideas to accelerate the development of management will be proposed for more practical purpose. The conclusion provokes further research in managing language teaching and culture promotion overseas.

Language practice in the multilingual workplace: A Confucius Institute in Macau

This article reports on an ethnographic study that investigated language practice in a multilingual workplace, a Confucius Institute in Macau. In the study we collected multiple data from five staff members through participatory observations, open-ended interviews, and field notes, to examine their language practice in the Institute. The analysis revealed that multiple languages were chosen to fulfill different purposes on different occasions. Specifically, Putonghua served as the working language of the Institute, English emerged as an auxiliary language along with Putonghua, and Cantonese was used as a group language for native-Cantonese speaker staff. This study also identified that the staff members adopted multilingualism (flexibly using different languages) and English as a lingua franca for communicating with learners outside the classroom, as important strategies for dealing with tasks in encounters with language diversity, divergence between spoken communication and written communication, and lack of multilingual competence. These findings suggest that the stakeholders in Confucius Institutes need to pay more attention to the language practice in these multilingual settings, and provide resources and support to enhance the staff’s bilingual/multilingual communication competence

An Analysis on Students’ Chinese Learning Needs of Confucius Institute at Hasanuddin University, Indonesia

Hasanuddin University in Indonesia through a questionnaire, the key point is to understand the learning needs of students and to make suggestions for optimizing the curriculum and teaching methods of Chinese teachers. Due to the limited time and conditions, there are some deficiencies in this study. As there are many factors affecting the learning needs, the questionnaire may not cover the whole content, it can only reflect the learning needs of learners, and cannot be used as an accurate measure. The study focused on comprehensive learning needs, so it was not compare the learning needs of students from the two teaching sites, nor was it compare the learning needs of male and female learners, these questions also require precise analysis by subsequent researchers. In addition, although the optimization of the proposal has a certain practicality, but still need to practice and improve.