On May 3, local time, the Chinese Bridge World Middle School Students Chinese Competition of 2019 was held in Bologna, Italy, and San Marino. Thirty-four contestants from 12 Confucius Institutes have demonstrated excellent language skills, which also shows a significant improvement in the level of Chinese teaching in Italy in recent years.
Around the theme of "Hand in Hand with Chinese, Build a Dream of the Future", the contestants told the story of how they got married with Chinese and what changes they had brought about by the study of the Chinese language.
Yi Mei, a contestant from the Confucius Institute of Bologna University, has been
studying the Chinese language since she was 7 years old and will graduate from high school this year. She said: "after President Xi Jinping visited Italy and met with our leaders and signed the memorandum of" one belt and one road ", many Chinese secondary schools in Italy opened Chinese classes. I am very grateful to my parents for letting me learn Chinese from an early age. I want to be a native Chinese teacher or a translator in the future.
Yimei and her partner won the network best Popularity Award in this competition. In the competition, she showed calm, standard pronunciation and fluent oral English. On the one hand, she learned Chinese from her childhood, on the other hand, it also came from various Chinese competitions, summer and winter camps and cultural activities held by the local Confucius Institute and Confucius classroom, which aroused the enthusiasm of Italian students in Chinese learning.
For the development of Chinese teaching in Italy, over the past 10 years, the cooperation between Confucius Institute and Italian educational institutions has played an important role.
In October 2016, the Italian Ministry of Education promulgated the Outline of Chinese Culture Teaching Standards for Italian Senior High Schools, which formally incorporated Chinese into the Italian national education system. Jin Zhigang, Chinese Dean of Confucius Institute of Milan National University, who has been teaching Chinese for 12 years in Italy, said that the standardization of Chinese teaching in Italy can not be separated from the relevant experience and standards provided by Confucius Institute.
He said: "The Italian syllabus refers to the standard syllabus of the Chinese proficiency test, and Confucian teachers are directly involved in the formulation of the syllabus. The promulgation of this syllabus is a sign that Italian high schools are integrated teaching, which is the most authoritative standard for Chinese teaching.
According to Jin Zhigang, with the signing of the memorandum of understanding on the "one belt and one road" initiative signed by China and Italy, the bilateral relations have entered the best period, and bilateral economic and trade relations have been further strengthened. The demand for learning Chinese in Italy is increasing. Chinese has become the second language among the 9 foreign language majors in Milan National University.
