Shijuan Liu: Book Review on Teaching the Chinese Language Remotely: Global Cases and Perspectives

1 General introduction

Since 1900, when Chinese lectures were first delivered via phonograph cylinders (Liu, 2022, p. 3), remote Chinese teaching has developed rapidly and spread around the world. Radio, records, TV programmes and Internet platforms have contributed tremendously to this growing trend of Chinese instruction. New technologies, such as interactive television and online learning management systems, and new instruction modes, such as fully online, hybrid, or blended and HyFlex education, have emerged to enable effective remote Chinese teaching. Online Chinese learners have expanded to include K–12 students, college students, working adults and other interested learners. There used to be a limited number of students who took Chinese language lessons fully online and instructors who taught entirely online. However, this situation changed drastically when COVID-19 hit the world in early 2020; instructors and students were suddenly dragged into the overwhelming crisis and subjected to the necessity of remote teaching. The edited volume Teaching the Chinese Language Remotely: Global Cases and Perspectives came into being in this peculiar situation, providing a comprehensive view of how Chinese courses switched to a fully online format during the early stages of the pandemic in 2020. It examines how instructors and students in different parts of the world perceived their experiences and related issues based on their still-recent memories of that era. This book serves not only as a source of information, reporting how students and teachers shifted to emergency remote teaching (ERT) to mitigate the spread of the virus, but also as a guide, providing principles and suggestions for effectively implementing future online Chinese instruction programmes around the globe.

2 Introduction to the book

The volume reviewed here was edited by Dr. Shijuan Liu from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and the chapters were written by a group of researchers around the world, who supply various cases of online Chinese teaching during the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. These cases come from Europe (the Czech Republic, Germany and Italy), Africa (South Africa and Mauritius), Oceania (Australia and New Zealand), Asia (Japan and China) and America (the United States), while a few describe cross-country experiences (China and the United States). In addition to a general overview of the book (Chapter 1), there are 14 chapters, divided into studies and practices.

3 Critical review

This book consists of studies of and practices used in global online Chinese teaching during the COVID-19. The fourteen chapters together recount rich experiences and profound insights into technology-enhanced Chinese language education. For teachers, especially, this book can serve as a guide, as it covers course design, platform development, teaching strategies and discussion communities, etc. This book is like a prism or encyclopaedia, showing us the recent changes in global online Chinese teaching in a new light.

The primary changes took place in online Chinese curricula. In terms of content, most universities designed preparatory courses for teachers and students to quickly adapt to the fully online teaching mode during the pandemic, and these courses yielded satisfying results, such as reducing students’ discomfort or anxiety. In course administration, the most obvious change is that the previous onsite or blended courses have almost all been converted to fully online offerings. Although remote Chinese courses had been developing for decades before the pandemic, they acted as supplements to the onsite mode and mainly centred on resource sharing, teacher–student email interaction, interactive exercises, and so on (Xie, 1999), while learning and teaching were usually asynchronous. However, during the pandemic, nearly all onsite activities were eventually moved online, and people started to explore and experiment with new, synchronous methods of learning and interaction in virtual classrooms. In terms of organisation, online teaching has significantly impacted traditional onsite forms of gathering. The boundaries of time and space have been obscured; traditional classes are at risk of elimination. Yet teachers often confront a series of issues online, such as a “lack of interaction”, “dissatisfaction” and “isolation among students” (Qutishat et al., 2022, p. 104); traditional pairs and groups are being weakened, which is also reflected in student reports in this book that the durations of and opportunities for communicative activities have been substantially reduced in online classes. The above changes, whether positive or negative, have been driving forces advancing Chinese curricula into the new age, and just as Dhawan (2020, p. 8) claimed, “Resistance to change will not help any educational unit across the world”.

Second, digital technology has played an increasingly vital part in Chinese teaching since the pandemic began. As the editor stated, technology is no longer “icing on the cake” but is regarded as “do-or-die” (Liu, 2022, p. 18). The readers of this book will easily notice that traditional digital tools, such as PowerPoint, Microsoft Word, Google Docs and social networking tools, such as WeChat, were used innovatively and experimentally during the pandemic; at the same time, teachers actively used various web conferencing tools, such as Zoom, WhatsApp, Skype and large-scale online teaching management platforms, such as Vula and Moodle, to interact with students in real time and facilitate different sorts of management work in virtual classrooms. Although students and teachers often struggle with technical problems, such as network connection and equipment damage, blended learning and fully online teaching are becoming more and more acceptable in universities, and this situation continues even in the post-pandemic era. Therefore, human beings and technology exhibit a positive relationship in the programmes of this book, which forms a sharp comparison with pre-pandemic digital teaching, in which technology offered not only service and assistance but also constraint and oppression. In this book’s cases, technology mostly tended to be in service of humanity in that teachers and students felt free to acquire, select, utilise and evaluate it rather than being forced to use it or oppressed by it.

Finally, compared with traditional online teaching, students’ subjectivity was further enhanced by ERT. Before the pandemic, teacher–student interaction was one of the main issues in online teaching. Lin and Zhang (2014) analysed Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and found that due to the large number of students enrolled, teachers could not have individual conversations with students. Moreover, MOOC lessons were teacher-centred in that the teacher spent most of the time giving explanations of language-related content. Teacher–student interaction was often limited to the forum or the period after the lesson, meaning that students’ subjectivity was more likely to be suppressed rather than promoted or developed. During the pandemic, all onsite meetings were moved online, so students were no longer just watching videos or taking notes as they did in traditional online sessions. They could send messages, ask questions and have group discussions online, which helped facilitate their participation and initiative. In addition, the projects in this book paid attention to students’ affective factors, such as anxiety and motivation, showing how teachers also provided students with affective care to different degrees. These measures have great value in strengthening and cultivating students’ subjectivity. As Russell (2020) suggested, affective factors need to be considered part of learning.

This book could also be improved in certain respects. First, the chapters are not always clearly related, as the cases are classified according to location rather than theme. Readers may find it difficult to extract common issues or experiences with Chinese online teaching, so the applicability of the findings or experiences in these cases is questionable. Second, the book is mainly based on descriptions, while it lacks in-depth theoretical analysis. As the theoretical foundation is not solid, the experiences in different countries become inconsistent and even contradictory. For instance, in some cases, students made great progress in writing Chinese characters, while other cases manifested students’ problems in writing. These contradictions require further theoretical analyses drawing on pedagogy, psychology, sociology, etc. in case confusion or doubt emerges.