Interview Series - Scholars from European Association of Chinese Teaching

The Fourth International Symposium of the European Association of Chinese Teaching (EACT) was held at the University of Southampton on 21st and 22nd April 2023, organised by the Confucius Institute at the University of Southampton. Taking this opportunity, the Confucius Institute conducted interviews with three keynote speakers, Professor Joël Bellassen, Professor Federico Masini, and Professor Andreas Guder. The interviews were summarised and compiled into a series, which will be published one after another.

[Interview I] Professor Joël Bellassen

Prof. Joël Bellassen, a renowned sinologist from France, served as the first Inspector-General of Chinese Language in the French Ministry of National Education. He is a professor at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) in Paris, the first Ph.D. supervisor in Chinese Language Teaching Methodology in Europe, the founder and first President of the French Association of Chinese Teachers, the President of the European Association of Chinese Language Teachers, and the Vice President of the World Association of Chinese Language Teaching.

In this interview, Professor Bellassen shared his view on the following aspects. 1) The lack of research on learners' motivation in Chinese language learning reflects our limited consideration of learners' unidirectional thinking in teaching. This also reflects the characteristic of Asian cultural norms, where less attention is given to the individual itself. 2) Regarding the tasks of linguistics and Chinese language teaching, he believes that linguistics is oriented to the description and analysis, while Chinese language teaching is oriented to transmission and transformation. He emphasises the importance for teachers to balance the teaching of characters and vocabulary when conveying and transforming knowledge. 3) His theory of "character-oriented" teaching is a "dichotomy of Chinese language teaching" that considers both characters and words simultaneously.