The First Tang Feng Chinese International Education Platform Seminar in USA

May 5th , 2018

On May 5, 2018, the first Tang Feng Chinese International Education Platform Seminar was held at Texas Southern University Confucius Institute (TSUCI) in Houston, USA. This seminar mainly introduced two parts of the platform, which were the sharing of Chinese teaching resources on the platform and the HSK examination. It also invited Chinese teachers at various teaching centers of TSUCI to create their own shared platform. The participants of this seminar were Chinese teachers in primary and secondary schools in the Houston area, TSUCI Chinese teachers and professors.

Tang Feng Chinese International Education Platform integrates teaching and research, teaching resources, and evaluation and education. At present, Tang Feng has established good cooperative relations with universities and Chinese institutions in South Korea, Malaysia and Thailand. The United States will become the fourth country to cooperate with Tang Feng. Texas Southern University is the first stop for Tang Feng Chinese to develop in the United States. It hopes to bring a different teaching experience to Chinese teachers thanks to its intelligent and efficient features.

The first session of Tang Feng Chinese International Education Platform Symposium kicked off with Professor Yi Xiao, the Chinese director of the TSUCI. In the discussion of the Tang Feng Platform's Localization of the United States, Prof. Yi Xiao firstly introduced the situation of Chinese teaching in pre-school, elementary school, middle school, and university (TSU as an example) in recent years, and analyzed it from the following five aspects: 1. Why choose Tang Feng 2. Chinese language teaching in the United States (teaching at Texas Southern University as an example) 3. Tang Feng or a similar platform for localization in USA 4. How schools and teachers collaborate with Chinese language teaching platforms 5. Future plans. Professor Yi Xiao looked forward to using this seminar to promote the construction of the Tang Feng platform in the United States and expressed her desire to jointly promote the development of Chinese language teaching in the Houston area.

The first part of the seminar mainly introduced the resources of the Tang Feng to the participants. Volunteer Chinese teacher Wang Jing briefly introduced the status of Tang Feng Chinese in China and the world, and then explained how to use this platform's resource library through three parts: courseware, homework, and exam. After teachers input keywords on this platform, they can search for various kinds of quality resources related to courses, including multimedia courses, video and audio materials, animations, pictures, texts, and PPT courseware, saving a lot of preparation time. As the platform resource database does not currently have textbooks and supporting resources for use for the Houston area, TSUCI invited and encouraged all Chinese teachers who come to attend the event to use the Tang Feng to jointly adapt to the Chinese language classroom in USA.

The second part of the seminar mainly introduced the application of HSK in this platform. Volunteer Chinese teacher Jin Zhi showed the teachers step by step on this platform how to implement the test on this platform, arranging examinations and approving the examination papers. In addition, Jin Zhi focused on introducing a very intelligent function of Tang Feng - statistical analysis. This platform has the function of automatically analyzing scores, recording student's wrong questions, identifying wrong question types, summarizing students' weak points, and analyzing the overall situation of the class. Chinese teachers often need these data to understand the learning of Chinese learners.

After the seminar, many teachers were very interested in this platform, saying that it really can bring many resources to Chinese teachers and provide a lot of convenience. They also came to inquire about more issues related to the Tang Feng and are looking forward to further cooperation with this platform.