Statement

Date: 24-25 April 2009
Venue: Room M1603, Li Ka Shing Tower, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

This is the second event in an annual series of workshops set up to enhance the pedagogical skills of Chinese language teachers to foreigners. While these activities give a chance of meeting pioneering experts in the field, offer first-hand experience of the new methods, they also provide a forum for exchange, discussions and help to develop a corporate identity.

The topic of the 2009 gathering at Hong Kong PolyU is Technology in Chinese Instruction, continuing and specializing on the success of the previous workshop at Chinese University of Hong Kong in March 2007.

The keynote speeches set the background by trying to answer the question of how much and what type of technology (computer, multimedia) is healthy in an efficient language classroom. International experts then introduce Chinese corpora exploitable for language instruction, introduce easy to use classroom concordancing programs for extracting specialized vocabulary and participants can also learn to combine living speech in corpus-based teaching materials creation.

Recent conferences in Beijing, United States and Macao have highlighted the need for a deeper involvement of Chinese instructors in researching the above questions and our workshop is streamlined to serve in this context.

The reputed team of experts ranges from China to Europe, USA and New Zealand. Details of speakers and their topics can be found at Programme.