Has anyone participated in an advanced teacher training sponsored by Hanban?

[mirgcire]

I was invited to attend this conference at the end of July. It is my understanding that there are dozens of these trainings happening in Beijing and Guangzhou. I have been teaching for 4 years now and a local teacher thought highly enough of my abilities to encourage me to signup and wrote a letter of recommendation. However I am not sure if my listening skills are high enough to follow an academic discussion on this topic, so I am looking for suggestions of material in Chinese about the pedagogy of teaching Chinese as a foreign language. I am also wondering if anyone else attended and has some suggestions for how to prepare.

Thanks, -Eric

[Meng Lelan]

Are you a teacher for a Confucius Institute? The HanBan has numerous conferences and workshops all through the year but I've not gone to any of those because they were all in Beijing and I did not want to go to Beijing for the seemingly billionth time in my life. This is the first time I've heard of trainings in Guangzhou and I would certainly be interested in going to Guangzhou for a conference. I wouldn't stress out about listening skills though. To my experience presentations on Chinese pedagogy rely heavily on Powerpoints with the attendees snapping pics of almost every slide with their cellphones.

[mirgcire]

There is a Confucius Institute in our city, but I haven't had much interaction with them. My impression is that they are holding the conference at 中山大学 in Guangzhou because they can't accommodate them all in Beijing. It seems that only those teaching Chinese in foreign countries are invited. And I am guessing they are putting on 100's of these conferences this summer. The training covers the use of 4 different text books as the basis for developing curriculum suitable to different target audiences. I will be traveling with a group of about 25 teachers from LA (although I am not from LA, they assigned me to that group anyway). Thanks for the suggestion about snapping pictures of the power points. You would think they would have the decency to give us a print out of the presentation materials.

[Meng Lelan]

I think those textbooks you're mentioning include the Great Wall Chinese curriculum. They're having hundreds of workshops on how to use those texts. My Confucius Institute actually was paying airfare for teachers who want to attend but I didn't want to go to a Beijing site. One of our teachers came back and did a presentation of what she learned there and from her talk I don't think you will need to know a lot of technical, professional, etc kinds of jargon and specialized vocabulary to understand the conference. If you can read Chinese (which I assume you can) then you should be okay following the presentations along with the materials they discuss.