On February 2nd , the Second Language Matters Conference was held at the Fantasy Hotel. Most of the more than 50 Chinese teachers from Edmonton Public Schools and all the CIE visiting teachers attended the conference.
The Confucius Institute in Edmonton was one of the sponsors for the conference, which focuses on improving second language education. Mrs. Joanna Chang from University of Calgary, Mr. Robert Kong Qingmin and Dr. Wei Li of the CIE, made a presentation on the “International Chinese Language Teaching Material Development Program”. The session was well attended. The purpose of the program is to better enable teachers to develop their own teaching materials using an on-line platform. This project is based on research and analysis of nearly 5000 commonly used Chinese language teaching materials worldwide. It provides a huge resource data base as well as assessment tools that can be integrated with locally developed resources.
This presentation was supported by the Division of Teaching Resources of Hanban.