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For the third year, Hamilton College is the recipient of STARTALK funding to operate two programs for Chinese language this summer—a Chinese teacher development program and a week-long intensive learning Chinese immersion course for students in grades 8 and 9.  This year’s grant of $125,000 will fund the ACC-STARTALK Teacher Program for non-native K-12 Chinese Teachers and ACC-STARTALK Youth Camp for Utica BOCES students on the Hamilton campus July 1 through 14.  

Professor of Chinese De Bao Xu published the article “The Evaluation of Web Participatory Learning Tools and the Criteria for Selecting Virtual Classroom Software” in Journal of Technology and Chinese Language Teaching, Vol. 2, No. 2, December 2011, P. 1-22.

Hamilton faculty participated in the 2012 STARTALK Winter Workshop hosted by the Associated Colleges in China at Hamilton on Jan. 6 and 7.  Hamilton participants included Hong Gang Jin, Ming De Xu, Lian Xue, Ying Gao, and Xiaoming Hou. The workshop was held in preparation for the 2012 STARTALK Program which will be held at Hamilton for two weeks in the summer of 2012.

Professor of Chinese De Bao Xu edited a special issue of the Journal of Technology and Chinese Language Teaching and attended the executive board of directors meeting at the annual conference of Chinese Language Teachers Association in Denver.

William R. Kenan Professor of East Asian Languages and Literature Hong Gang Jin and Lian Xue, teaching fellow in Chinese, presented a paper at the annual American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages/Chinese Language Teachers Association (ACTFL/CLTA) conference on Nov. 18 in Denver.

Hong Gang Jin, the William R. Kenan Professor of East Asian Languages & Literature, recently published “Participatory Learning and Interactive Teaching: A Comparative Study of CFL with Web Tools” in the Journal of Taiwan Chinese as a Second Language.

Professor of Chinese De Bao Xu gave the keynote speech at the 47th International Conference on Elementary Chinese Education (ICECE) held July 20-22 at the University of Zhengzhou Normal University, Henan Province, China. Xu’s address focused on macro Chinese education.

De Bao Xu, professor of Chinese, was invited to give a talk at ICICE7, the 7th International Conference on Internet Chinese Education,  in Taipei, Taiwan, June 17-19. His talk was titled “The Participatory and Interactive Online Tools and the Standards to Choose Virtual Classroom Software.”

Learning a second language is undoubtedly a challenging undertaking, and the pedagogical methods involved in teaching a second language can make the process easier or more difficult for students.  Linda Yu ’12 will spend this summer with Professor Hong Gang Jin, the William R. Kenan Professor of East Asian Languages, testing different pedagogical methods for teaching Chinese. Their project, “Attention to What? An Investigation on the Linkage Between Attention and Input,” is funded by an Emerson Summer Grant.

Eight seniors in Professor De Bao Xu’s Chinese 495 course, Practicum in Chinese Language Education, have had a rewarding spring semester teaching elementary school students about various aspects of Chinese culture.  The program, which collaborates with the Oneida-Herkimer-Madison Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES), is funded through a U.S. Department of Education Foreign Language Assistance Program (FLAP) grant.