Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language MA in China

[RoyT]

Well, i'd be happy to share with everybody my studying experience. Actually supposedly there is a special page here that deals with the major I'm studying, however I failed to find it now.

 

Well, I guess a lot of you have heard about the major of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (汉语国际教育 in Chinese)...this is quite a popular major for foreign undergraduate students in China I suppose. I'm studying at Sichuan University...this is my second and last year where I need to write and hand in my M.A thesis.

Overall I would say the studying of this major in this specific university is rather disappointing and did not match my expectations at all. I think the only good thing that I can say about this major, from a foreign student point of view, is that when you are forced to study with 100+ Chinese students in the same class, your Chinese is getting better, simply because you just have no choice but to use Chinese in order to communicate with everyone. Moreover, most of our "exams" include writing papers in Chinese or/and to give presentation in class, something that helps alot your writing and confidence of speaking Chinese in front of a large audience. The individual courses weren't really exciting to say the least, but some were very interesting and actually had something to do with "how to teach Chinese", a subject where most of the courses I took didn't have the slightest connection with. (A short story that sums it up: we had a class with some random teacher, she was quite miserable and had to admit "Although I never taught a foreigner Chinese in my life, however I'm still going to teach you how to do that" and then forced all of foreigners (11 overall, mostly Asians) to share their experience of studying Chinese at their home countries. A real shame).

 

So basically this is it..if you have more questions please feel free to ask...and again, I would appreciate it very much if you answer my survey.

And I promise to post something about my thesis' result here when I'm done      

[歐博思]

How are there so many students in your M.A. class? I'm considering a TCFL masters and I'm concerned if that student to teacher ratio is considered common.

[RoyT]

Well, it seems like every university has a different plan about how the foreigners study this major. Here we are simply put with the Chinese students, and in addition have to take some "special classes for foreigners"...the individual classes were actually better than the one with the Chinese students, not because the amount of people oo the student-teacher ratio, it's just the common classes were a complete waste of time most of the time, for the Chinese classmates as well.

I know in other universities the foreign students have a total different schedule from the Chinese classmates, but since this is a "Hanban" owned kind of program, everybody studies more or less the same thing.

Where are you thinking of taking it? 

[歐博思]

Were the Chinese students with who you took mixed classes studying for their masters or bachelors?

 

As for myself, I'm considering programs in southern China because I wouldn't be happy studying in cold weather again. So maybe Sun Yat Sen or Nanjing University. I still need to do more research to be sure because I don't want just a nice campus but poor program.