UWTSD Staff make great progress learning Mandarin

After six weeks of study, UWTSD staff who attended the Confucius Institute’s introduction to Mandarin course were delighted to receive their certificates.

The course was designed to support professional development and give staff members teaching Chinese students a basic grounding in Chinese communication skills. The course covered useful expressions in Chinese for teaching as well as a fascinating overview of Chinese culture. Students made great progress with spoken Chinese allowing them to exchange greetings and talk about real life situations.

One of the students on the course, Dr. Jessica Clapham, ELT Lead, Professional Doctorate Programme UWTSD, Lampeter, commented:

"I joined the 6-week Introduction to Mandarin course run by Cindy Chen from the Confucius Institute as being able to converse in Mandarin opens up a whole new world for future travel and employment, but also in order to be able to communicate with our PG groups, which consist of mainly overseas students from Mainland China.

I was delighted to receive my certificate and converse with colleagues and experts in Chinese language and culture.

I particularly enjoyed the teaching methods which were a mixture of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and Audiolingualism. As an Applied linguist, it was interesting being on the receiving end and I was surprised how much we achieved in a short period of time with such enthusiastic tutors. There were plenty of opportunities to practise in a relaxed, supportive environment and we learnt language which was very relevant to our teaching groups, whilst accessing an ancient civilization.

I would encourage everyone to have a go!"

Having mastered the basic essentials, some of the cohort are now going on to study for the HSK Chinese proficiency test. The new HSK 1 course will be offered from the end of January and involves two hours of online classes per week, covering the well-established HSK 1 curriculum which leads to an internationally recognised certificate.  The course will continue until early June when the HSK test will be held. All staff are most welcome to join.

Course tutor, Cindy Chen commented: ‘I’m very proud of the students’ achievement in just six weeks of learning Chinese. The HSK 1 course will build on this firm foundation and is designed to give students a thorough grounding in spoken Chinese as well as recognising Chinese characters and being able to read pinyin.’

The HSK 1 Chinese course is free to UWTSD staff and will run at a time to suit staff from the end of January.  For more information email k.krajewska@uwtsd.ac.uk 

Further Information

For more information please contact Arwel Lloyd, Principal PR and Communications Officer, on 07384 467076 / arwel.lloyd@uwtsd.ac.uk