LinkChinese UK News

UK schools are to import Mandarin teachers from China to assistant Mandarin-teaching in state schools. The Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT), an educational charity, which represents 90 per cent of England’s 2,950 state secondary schools, has signed an agreement with China’s Office of Chinese Language Council International (also known as Han Ban 汉办).

Under this scheme, schools will host two Chinese teaching assistants each, who will work in several schools. The teachers, funded and paid for by the schools and Han Ban, will be expected to stay for up to two years.

Sir Cyril Taylor, chairman of the SSAT, said it should be seen as the key language for future generations to learn - replacing European languages.

He told Parliament Education and Skills Committee: “I want all language colleges to be teaching Mandarin. It is a strategic world language. The difficulty in the past has been getting Chinese teachers. However, exchanges between our schools and Chinese schools will help to change that. We learn from them and they learn from us.”

According to The Times newspaper, about 60 Chinese Language Assistants were placed in English schools last year under this scheme. The number rises to 80 this year, and is expected to reach 100 by 2008.

The Times’s report: 100 teachers imported from China

The Independent’s report: Schools import China’s teachers for lessons in ‘language of tomorrow’.

 

The official website of the Lithuanian Parliament has a Chinese version. The Chinese version (in Simplified Chinese 简体中文), introduces to the visitors of the work of
the Parliament, history of the Baltic republic and its parliament, and the history and development of the diplomatic relation between Lithuanian and China.

Beside Lithuanian, the official language, the Lithuanian Parliament website has already had an English and French version.

 

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has launched a new consolidated Chinese-language Web site as part of its ongoing effort to provide environmental information in English, Spanish and Chinese.

The new site compiles EPA Chinese-language materials on a wide variety of issues from lead poisoning prevention, energy efficiency, and clean water to proper management of pesticides. At the moment most of the contents are in Traditional Chinese (繁体中文), but EPA promises more contents in Simplified Chinese (简体中文) will be added soon.

The site also serves as a valuable tool in delivering important health and environmental information to the Chinese-speaking community, both here in the U.S. and worldwide, to help protect local communities as well as the global environment.

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Australia’s opposition leader Kevin Rudd announced in his budget replay speech that his party, Labour, would spend $65 million over four years to re-establish a strategy for Asian languages and studies in Australian schools. This is to help the economic and political engagement between Australia and Asian countries. Kevin Rudd can speak Mandarin Chinese fluently himself.

However in a radio report broadcasted on Austrialia’s Radio National, reporter Paula Kruger interviewed students learning Asian languages and found for Australian students, learning the tonal Asian languages is not easy. Moreover Australian employers still don’t see their language skills as necessary.

A transcript of the program can be read here.

 

Newcastle’s Evening Chronicle reports that some schools in the northeast England have started to give Mandarin lessons to their pupils. Some have organised or are preparing school trips to China. Hilary French, the headmistress of Central Newcastle High School, whose pupils are just back from a trip to Beijing, said GDST (The Girls’ Day School Trust, which Central High is part of) is planning to open two new schools in Shanghai.

Another school, Park View Community School, in Chester-le-Street, County Durham, has fromed a partnership with Suzhou High School near Shanghai. What’s more, young children at Bedewell Primary, in Hebburn, South Tyneside, having been learning Mandarin for the last two years, after the school formed a link with one in China.
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A local newspaper in London, Muswell Hill Journal

reports:

Children as young as three are taking up Mandarin at a Muswell Hill language school.

The Hua Hsia Chinese School, which first opened in Swiss Cottage, has now started classes in Muswell Hill as demand has exploded.

Katja Ting, originally from Taiwan, who runs the school, said: “China has become powerful and people want to trade with them. If you have that language on your CV you will get a job because not many people have it.

Read the full report.