Chinese language courses are now offered to West and City High students through a postsecondary enrollment program.
By Shelby Leisinger
Iowa City high-school students at City and West now have the opportunity to enroll in a Chinese language and culture course offered through the Confucius Institute on-site at their schools.
Program coordinator Erin Mullins said the institute has two main goals: to educate the community about Chinese culture both at the college level and at a community level and also teaching Chinese as a foreign language.
The institute is a nonprofit public educational organization affiliated with the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, whose aim is to promote Chinese language and culture, support local Chinese teaching internationally, and facilitate cultural exchanges.
There are approximately 23 high-school students enrolled in the Chinese language course from West and City, with West making up the majority.
“Whatever level you’re able to attain as a foreign language, having at least some level of learning helps you better connect with the people whom you’re working with if they are from another country or culture,” Mullins said.
The Chinese language program was previously open to students in high school through the postsecondary enrollment program but only on the UI campus, limiting its accessibility to high-school students’ schedules.
The course is now offered on-site as a postsecondary program that will count as both UI credit and high-school credit.
Xi Ma, a staff member at the Confucius Institute, co-teaches the course with Qi Wang, a visiting teacher from East China Normal University in Shanghai.
“This is our new project that started mid-September. We have been teaching introductory Chinese courses,” Ma said. “I think it’s going pretty well so far; it’s a very good group of learners.”
Ma is originally from the middle-eastern region of China called Anhui. One of her other main roles as a staff member at the institute is to supervise teachers from China and attempt to bring in UI international students as guest speakers to teach students in the program about Chinese culture.
A plan is in the works to offer a study-abroad program specifically for high-school students after they have completed two courses of the Chinese language. Professor and director of the Confucius program, Chuanren Ke, said this would be a good time for them to go to China for four or five weeks.
“We think that it’s important for them to go to China. It can be a transformative experience,” Ke said. “It takes a lot of planning for a study-abroad program; you want to make sure that they will be there to learn.”
The study-abroad program would begin in the summer of 2018 at the earliest. High-school scholarship seekers and UI students seeking to study abroad in China can find more information through the Confucius Institute.
The institute attempts to stress how important it is to be bilingual or have some knowledge of a language other than English. China has the world’s largest population with just under 1.4 billion in September, according to U.N. estimates.
“Iowa and a province in China are sister cities, and a lot of local companies have Chinese ties — John Deer and Rockwell Collins,” Ma said. “China is one of the major trading partners of the U.S., so [companies] are looking for people who have proficiency in the language. We are nurturing global citizens.”
The institute recognizes that some English-speaking community members may be wary of learning an Asian language. Mullins is taking a Chinese language course and is in her second year of learning.
“I think sometimes people are afraid to take Asian languages,” she said. “It’s not as daunting a task as they might think. There’s so many fields where Chinese is applicable now — agriculture, technology, environmental issues — there are so many areas.”
Ke said the Chinese language is very “learnable” and “logical,” making it fairly easy to learn.
“Somehow, people develop this kind of perception that it’s very hard, but this perception is just a perception,” he said. “To see students grow and see how they function with Chinese, that is my favorite part.”