New Criteria for L2 Chinese Teachers’
Pedagogical Competence Development
国际汉语教师素质培养的新思考基点
姬 建 国 Jianguo Ji
纽约城市大学 曼哈顿学院
The
Abstract:
The
training of L2 Chinese teachers for American classrooms needs to transcend the
traditional approach that focuses disproportionately on the linguistic
description of the language form. To better facilitate learners’ acquisition of
Chinese as a foreign language, it becomes all the more necessary to place a new
emphasis on nurturing a strong transcultural consciousness about L2 pedagogy,
and on developing a transculturally-oriented, on-the-spot need-based, and
process-targeted capacity of instruction.
Such a
new criterion is derived from the nature of the L2 Chinese education, whose
uniqueness is particularly manifested in the academic characteristics of this
field of learning, in the expectations for teachers’ professional knowledge
structure and pedagogical competence to be able to cope with learners’ needs
for transculturally-oriented cognitive-linguistic development, and in the
crucial importance of transculturally-emphatic pedagogical consciousness for L2
Chinese teacher training. It also sets peculiar demands for theory building and
teacher preparation specifics. L2 Chinese teacher training operations will need
to undergo corresponding adjustments and modifications in order for the quality
of L2 Chinese teacher education to meet the transcultural needs of the
learners.
The reciprocity between challenges in instructed L2 Chinese acquisition
and the quality of teacher training demands serious attention and adequate
coping strategies.
To secure effective instruction, substantial pedagogical competence
needs to be developed during the teacher education process -- necessarily
before a prospective teacher gets deployed into the classroom; supportive or remedial
in-service teacher training arrangement needs to be in place -- especially for
new teachers and junior faculty members.
The measure of a successful teacher development process is ultimately
the consistency between a teacher’s developed insight into the L2 Chinese
acquisition process, on the one hand, and his/her effective execution of
instructional designs and pedagogical facilitation of the L2 Chinese learning,
on the other.