Professor of Chinese Hong Gang Jin was recently elected as vice president of National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages (NCOLCTL), a national organization for languages which are less commonly taught in the U.S. There are more than 20 member organizations within NCOLCTL. Jin will serve as vice president for the next two year and then assume the presidency.
One of the missions of the council is to increase the number of Americans who choose to learn one or more of the less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) as a means of enhancing cross-cultural communication among citizens of the United States. The Council also promotes the use of technology, especially computers and the Internet, to enable a new era in cross-cultural understanding, communication and language education.
Jin also organized an International Conference on Chinese Language Education
(ICCLE) in July, co-sponsored by Hamilton College and Duke University and held at Beijing Capital Normal University, Beijing, China. There were 23 panels and 180 participants from both the U.S. and China. Jin was one of the two principal organizers (with Prof. Kunshan Lee at Duke University) and served as the conference chair. Hamilton President Joan Hinde Stewart gave the opening remarks, and Dr. Richard Brecht, director of the Center for Advanced Language Research at the University of Maryland, was the conference keynote speaker. Jin's conference presentation was titled "A Comparative Study of Instructors' and Learners' Beliefs about Language Learning in a Study Abroad Context."
