Professor of Chinese Hong Gang Jin received a research grant from the National Science Council in Taiwan in August, 2002. She is currently working with colleagues at the Institute of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language at National Taiwan Normal University. The grant is a prestigious research grant from the Taiwan government, which provides support for Jin's research and living expenses for ten months in Taiwan. While there, she plans to collect data and necessary materials for her two books: 1. The Role of Classroom Interaction in Second Language Acquisition; 2. Experimental Studies of Multimedia Effects on Chinese Language Learning. Jin is also visiting different Chinese programs in Taiwan and giving lectures on topics of Chinese language pedagogy.
Consultant for the United Nations: Jin acted as United Nations Consultant for restructuring the Chinese Program and recruiting a new director. She was involved in writing up the exams, conducting the search, and final stage interviews with offers at the UN.
Elected Member of a Nation-wide Task Force Group: Jin was elected as a member of The Task Force Group in August 2001. The group was selected by the officers at the National Foreign Languages Center with a funding from Luce Foundation. The eight members of the group work closely with the Commission for the Field of Teaching Chinese as a foreign language work on the field building and the Chinese language part of the Lang-net, a nation-wide network for proving electronic learning tools to different foreign language
learners. Since the beginning of the project last year, I have been involved in drafting up the mission statement of the commission, identifying goals and areas of improvement, for the Chinese Language Teaching Field, and a national survey on various issues concerning the field. Starting from this September, I am involved in a group, which works on a series of multimedia learning materials on the basis of different learning styles and objectives.
Sponsoring a Lecture Series in Beijing: While directing the ACC program for the summer, Jin also organized a lecture series for the teachers of Chinese as a Foreign Language at ACC and in the greater Beijing area during the summer of 2002. The lecture series involved six lectures on different topics relating to linguistics, language pedagogy, learning theories, assessment, discourse analysis, and multimedia development.
Lecture 1: From the Schema Theory to Lecture Organization by Prof. Hsin-hsin
Liang, University of Virginia
Lecture 2: Theory and Practice on Advanced Language Teaching by Prof. Neil Kubler, Williams College
Lecture 3: Oral Proficiency Interview: One Way of Assessing Learner's Oral Production Ability by Prof. Qun Ao, Brandies University
Lecture 4: Multimedia Technology in Chinese Language and Culture Course Design by Prof. De Bao Xu and Hong Gang Jin
Lecture 5: An In-depth Look at the Pronunciation Errors in Learner's Production by Professor Longhua Hu, Brown University
Lecture 6: The Pedagogical Importance of Discourse Structures in Learning Chinese as a Foreign Language by Songren Cui, Bodwoin College
