Educators discuss innovative ways to promote Chinese culture worldwide

Seasoned English language educators from a variety of countries and regions attending a high-profile English education assembly in Macao on Friday highlighted the importance of training more versatile talent in order to disseminate Chinese culture more effectively on the global stage, and exchanged firsthand experiences of integrating the essence of Chinese culture and history into English language teaching.

The 2023 Global English Education China Assembly, which started on Friday, created a special committee that invited exceptional minds from the English teaching sector to exchange ideas and opinions on furthering the promotion of Chinese culture on the global stage.

Chairing the committee was Mu Yang, who is also the chair of the School of English Studies, and associate dean for the Faculty of Foreign Studies at Beijing Language and Culture University.

She is scheduled to deliver a speech on Saturday, the second day of the assembly. One of the key areas of her research involves the development of a new set of training objectives and a curriculum to train more talent specialized in the international communication of Chinese culture.

Mu noted that the process has been hindered by a variety of factors, including language barriers and geopolitical tensions.

She added that the endeavor requires more multilingual talent capable of breaking through with cross-cultural communication skills.

Mu also said that through a virtual research platform launched by the Ministry of Education, many linguists in China, herself included, have been working on the reform of the training model for talent specialized in the international communication of Chinese culture.

The platform has organized ten lectures and exchange activities involving renowned scholars, teachers and experts in the field of international communication to date, she added.

Mu encouraged all educators to incorporate more Chinese culture activities into English teaching, as practical experience can help students better understand, and later spread, Chinese culture.

The teaching mode can be varied to fit the needs of different grades, according to Mu.

As for the importance of building stronger cultural bonds, Liu Jun, rector of the City University of Macau and president of the International Research Foundation for English Language Education, highlighted Macao's unique advantages from a language teacher's perspective, and said that the multilingual city, where Portuguese, English, Mandarin, and Cantonese are spoken, gives its inhabitants an advantage when it comes to understanding people from different cultural backgrounds.

Calling the assembly "one of the best conferences he has attended" in terms of size and quality, Liu said that the conference, which spreads news about developments in the field of English education, can benefit China and other parts of the world, and should continue to be supported.

Putting educational theories into action, Xie Guanghong, Chen Jingjing and Zheng Xin, three teachers from a prestigious high school on the mainland — the Chengdu No 7 High School in Sichuan province who were in attendance, shared with China Daily their experience of using the Chinese literature classic, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, to teach traditional Chinese wisdom and values in their classrooms.

They said that many famous storylines in the novel, which is based on stories from the Three Kingdoms period (220-280), reflect enduring values like solidarity, loyalty and righteousness.

As English serves as a lingua franca for communication and cultural exchange between people from different nations and regions, they emphasized that studying the English version of Chinese values and wisdom can help hone the skills of Chinese students, allowing them to better and more effectively convey Chinese concepts and wisdom to a global audience.

Liu Hong, an associate professor from the School of Foreign Languages at Lanzhou Jiaotong University in Gansu province, presented the results of her research: a Chinese-English parallel corpus of common words from the ancient Silk Road cultures in Gansu, to the assembly.

Speaking to China Daily on Friday, Liu Hong emphasized the importance of introducing the rich cultural heritage of the Silk Road — an ancient trade and culture exchange route between China and Europe via Eurasia — to the world in a more comprehensive and vivid manner, and said that a bilingual parallel corpus would provide rich context, enabling translators to accurately and consistently translate terms.

The annual English education assembly, which has drawn some 1,600 experts, front-line educators, and scholars from 20 countries and regions, including China, the USA, the UK, New Zealand, Italy, Thailand, Russia, Singapore, Nepal, Mongolia, Indonesia and Pakistan, both online and in person, will conclude on Sunday.