Highlights:

【Topic in Focus】The topic of this issue is “the ideas, principles and methods of teaching Chinese”, around which Chinese and overseas experts, scholars and teachers have been invited to have discussions in the hope of achieving consensus on “how to teach Chinese”. Scholars who are interested in this topic are invited to continue the discussion.

【Feature Articles】Dr. Andreas Guder and Lee He-Fang give an analysis of the general problems faced by teaching Chinese as a foreign language in Europe from a perspective outside the cultural circle of Chinese characters and then discuss the significant role of “Sinographemic competence” defined in EBCL (European Benchmarks Chinese Language) in Chinese language teaching.

【Dr. Keiko Koda’s Lectures on Second Language Acquisition】 “L1-Induced Facilitation in L2 Reading Development” is the first of the three articles based on three lectures given by Dr. Keiko Koda and Dr. Ke Sihui in BLCU in 2017. 

Dr. Andreas Guder is the chairman of Chinese Language Teachers’ Association in German Speaking Countries, German dean of the Academic Confucius Institute (AKI) at G?ttingen University (Germany), and a Sinology professor, whose research interests include Chinese characters teaching, teaching methodology of Chinese as a foreign language, and training of Chinese teaching staff.

Dr. Keiko Koda is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University (the US), whose research interests are second language development, bilingual reading, and foreign language teaching methodology. Dr. Koda’s major achievements and works include: cooperation with Development Associates, Center for Applied Linguistics, Educational Testing Service, American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, and the U.S. Department of Education in projects on second language reading research and evaluation; used to be or being a member of the editorial committee of journals such as Reading Research Quarterly, Reading and Writing, Research in Second Language Learning, TESOL Quarterly, and The Modern Language Journal.