| Abstract |
Emerging from our previous AHRC-funded research on new Chinese writing, this project, "Reading Chinese: engaging new audiences", primarily responds to an urgent need arising from recent guidelines from the Department for Education on language teaching. These guidelines specify a new requirement for a significant amount of literature to be taught within the modern language curriculum, from the early years of secondary school. The Chinese curriculum is modelled on that for European languages. When these guidelines were discussed with UK-based teachers of Chinese, during a presentation we made about our previous research project at the annual Chinese Teachers Conference in the Institute of Education, many expressed anxiety about finding resources which were both age-appropriate and covered the necessary topics. There was a strong consensus that to be practicable with a challenging language like Chinese works needed also to be available in English translation. In a follow-up survey, many teachers expressed a lack of awareness of literature which was written in simple modern language, as these works are not generally covered either in school curricula in China (where the focus is often on traditional, classical works) or, for the UK-trained teachers, in many University programmes. This also comes at a time of significant Government investment in Chinese at school level, with a £10 million Mandarin Excellence Programme having been launched in 2016. The second identified need has emerged from our discussions in the research network with publishers, translators, and authors of new Chinese writing. There is broad agreement across our network that the lack of non-academic reviews of new Chinese writing in English translation is a key obstacle in promoting new works. Publishers are wary of taking on new projects without these, particularly if the topics do not fit the standard 'acceptable' tropes such as memoirs of the Cultural Revolution. The third need (established via surveys amongst the membership of the Association for Speakers of Chinese as a Second Language) is for CPD training for graduates and other professionals who have learned Chinese to a high level, but need to source appropriate and accessible reading material to maintain their language skills, despite busy working lives -- contemporary literary texts can provide an obvious, and enjoyable, solution, but they need to be selected appropriately. To address these needs, we will develop a new user-led sustainable web resource on Chinese literature, with teaching materials and book reviews, and linked to a fully searchable, free-to-view full-text database of new Chinese writing in English translation. We will also develop a training programme for teachers to address the practicalities of teaching literature, which will involve an annual seminar at the IOE's PGCE training programme (Mandarin pathway) and a residential workshop for selected teachers, leading to the establishment of a network of ambassadors for teaching literature in the curriculum. Finally, in partnership with leading publishers, we will set up a volunteer book review network, modelled on the BBC Radio 2 bookclub, where reviewers are sent a free copy, 'blind' in return for providing a review for our site. The teaching materials and training programme will be developed in partnership with the Confucius Institute based at the Institute of Education, which hosts a network of over 800 teachers of Chinese in the UK, and which leads the development and mainstreaming of Mandarin Chinese in secondary and primary schools across England The database will be developed in partnership with Paper Republic, a Beijing-based collective of translators and authors at the forefront of new Chinese writing. The book review network will be facilitated by titles provided free of charge by our partners Penguin Books and Balestier Press (the leading independent publisher of Chinese fiction in translation). |
