Southampton Confucius Institute participated in scientific research project and won “The British Academy Talent Development Award”

Dr Ying Zheng, Director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Southampton, Dr Yu-Hua Chen from Coventry University, and Prof Roumyana Slabakova from the School of Modern Languages at the University of Southampton have been successful in winning a British Academy Talent Development Award 2021 for a one-year research project on A-level Chinese examination in UK high schools. The project will be carried out in 2022-2023.

The aim of the Talent Development Awards is to promote the building of skills and capacities for current and future generations, in core areas including quantitative skills, interdisciplinarity, data science, digital humanities and languages. This scheme aims to promote the acquisition and advancement of skills in relevant areas by UK-based researchers, promoting innovative research methods, through either skills development, collaboration or dissemination.

This project involves a series of statistical and corpus-based investigations into the alignment of A-level Mandarin Chinese to the Common European Framework of Reference. Along with the emerging recognition of the importance of grasping a modern foreign language in the post-Brexit era, there is a lack of understanding of how Chinese as a foreign language is aligned to a common benchmark of proficiency and how best to integrate the teaching, learning and assessment of Mandarin into foreign language curricula at post-secondary school level in the UK. This research aims to link UK initiatives with global teaching of modern foreign languages, including Mandarin Chinese, and to help develop shared international understanding of standards and proficiency levels.