Professor of Chinese De Bao Xu organized the Seventh International Conference and Workshops on Technology and Chinese Language Teaching in the 21st Century (TCLT7) held May 25-27 at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM). Co-sponsored by Hamilton College and UHM, the main themes of the conference were cloud computing and mobile technology and their application to technology-based language instruction.

William R. Kenan Professor of East Asian Languages and Literature Hong Gang Jin was invited to present a paper, “Cognition and Chinese Language Acquisition,” at the International Symposium on Chinese Linguistics and Language Teaching at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The May symposium was co-sponsored by University of Hawaii at Manoa and Peking University.

Professor of Chinese De Bao Xu chaired and was a discussant on a panel titled “The teaching and acquisition of Chinese vocabulary and characters-discussions in a modern context” on March 17 at the Annual Meeting of Association of Asian Studies (AAS) in Toronto.

On February 25, 21 middle school students from the Oneida-Herkimer-Madison BOCES Chinese program visited Hamilton College to participate in the 2012 STARTALK student reunion. The students experienced many Chinese cultural activities such as Tai-Chi Sword, calligraphy and paper cutting.

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.

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.