The 12th New York International Conference on Teaching Chinese: Deadline reminder

Please be aware that the deadline for submitting a proposal to present at the 12th New York International Conference on Teaching Chinese is February 15. Please visit http://clta-gny.org/14conf/14conf.html for details. Keynote speakers will be announced shortly.

Teaching Chinese in the Global Community:
Developing Communicative Competence in a New Age

The 12th New York International Conference on Teaching Chinese, sponsored by the Chinese Language Teachers Association of Greater New York (CLTA-GNY), New York University and Nanjing University, will be held on Saturday, May 3, and Sunday, May 4, 2014 at New York University’s Kimmel Center. The full conference program begins with breakfast on May 3, and ends after lunch on Sunday, May 4. We welcome your participation!

As Chinese language educators, we are charged with the task of teaching Chinese to studentsof all ages, from a wide variety of backgrounds, with widely varying interests and experiences and differing motivations for studying Chinese. Our students often have limited knowledge about China and limited exposure to Chinese language and culture.

The world continues to get smaller as advances in technology connect us more closely every day. Yet, at the same time, gaps in our understanding still occur – cultural insensitivity exists and we fail to understand each other and truly respect our varying cultural viewpoints. So, as we consider culture, we must not just traditional culture, which informs our deepest belief systems, but also modern and popular culture, which reflects the real lives of our students and their counterparts in China. I t is not enough to teach language alone: we must teach culture, develop cross-cultural values such as mutual understanding, respect, tolerance, empathy, and many others through comparative and contrastive study of Asian culture and Western culture.

As teachers, we need ongoing support and training in understanding the schools in which we teach, our students and their parents; well-planned and structured training in new trends of standards-based learning to align our teaching to the Common Core Standards, immersion strategies, and the teaching of culture. We must find ways to reach our students, digital natives for whom technology is second nature and whose ways of learning may be influenced by the key role that multimedia devices play in their lives. We must base our teaching on the latest theoretical and linguistic breakthroughs to assist us in developing our instructional plans and syllabi for the teaching of Chinese.

We must be committed to improving the quality of Chinese instruction in schools, and to the development of a student population with a global competence. Join us at the 2014 Annual Conference of the Chinese Language Teachers Association of Greater New York to discuss these ideas and continue in the professional development of the Chinese teaching community!

We invite you to submit a proposal for our conference! All proposals on the teaching of Chinese in are welcome, including but not limited to innovative approaches in addressing the following areas of interest:

• CULTURAL Competence: developing global competence and mutual understanding, working with diverse students, pragmatics.

• TECHNOLOGICAL Competence: using technology to engage our students and advance their learning

• PEDAGOGICAL Competence: curriculum and instruction, including standards-based teaching and learning and assessment

• LINGUISTIC competence: research and advances in linguistics to inform our teaching

• PROGRAMMATIC competence : Teacher training and professional development, sustainability of programs, articulation of programs.

The CLTA-GNY Conference Committee welcomes submissions of one-page proposals on subjects relevant to the above themes or other topics of interest to the K-16 Chinese teaching community. Papers may be either in Chinese or English. Panel proposals as well as proposals for individual papers will be considered. All proposals will be reviewed anonymously. Individual papers will be grouped into panels by themes. Panels will be 75 minutes long with four presenters.

Proposals should be submitted to clta.gny@gmail.com as a Word document and are due no later than February 15, 2014. Late submissions will not be considered.

Questions: clta.gny@gmail.com

The conference website is http://clta-gny.org/14conf/14conf.html, where you can see updates, info about registration, conference venue, hotel recommendations, conference chairs and conference committee.

Please note the following:

The conference fee is $30.

We’ll be only accepting online registration.

Keynote speakers will be announced in due time.
Hope to see you all at NYU next May!

CLTA-GNY Conference Committee

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Chinese Language Teachers Association of Greater New York
http://clta-gny.org