Mandarin Chinese for Teachers over the Internet

Isabel Tasker*
Murdoch University
tasker@central.murdoch.edu.au

Despite aims to achieve an increase in the teaching of Asian languages in Australian schools, the pool of trained teachers is very small. This session will present an ongoing project to develop, trial and evaluate, anddeliver an accredited distance mode Graduate Certificate course in ModernStandard Chinese (Mandarin) for teachers. The course is being designed forinternet and multimedia delivery. The project is funded by DEETYA for theNALSAS (National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools)strategy taskforce.

The development team is based at Melbourne University, and includes membersfrom Murdoch and Griffith universities, so we are working at a distance todevelop materials for distance delivery, which is proving to be a goodexperiential learning process for us all.

This presentation will describe the project and examine some of the issuesencountered so far. These include:
* the strengths of web-based and multimedia delivery for language learningin general, and for learning Chinese in particular* the challenges of the medium for language learning, such as thedevelopment of oral fluency* syllabus development issues: "subordinating our teaching to learning"* incorporating Web resources into meaningful language learning* software issues - choice of Chinese character fonts* using a website for project management