Chinese Teachers' Summer Institute at GSE

GSE's Chinese Language Teachers' Institute will offer intensive summer courses covering Chinese for Chinese teachers and standards-based foreign language curriculum design and assessment. Partial to full tuition support is available to participants who already hold teacher certification in another subject area.

The major goals are:

1. to increase the number of qualified Mandarin Chinese teachers to meet the growing interest and needs at K-12 levels of schooling;
2. to help participants achieve a level of Mandarin proficiency appropriate for their instructional needs;
3. to raise participants' awareness about the role and application of linguistics and cultural studies to Chinese language teaching and teaching; and
4. to prepare participants to provide standards-based instruction and assessment.

The two 35-hour courses, Educational Linguistics for Chinese Language Teachers and Approaches to Chinese Language Teaching, will be open to native speakers, heritage speakers, or those who have achieved a high level of proficiency in Mandarin Chinese.

Our primary target population includes teachers who already have Pennsylvania teacher certification and proficiency in Chinese. Our rationale is that the intensive teacher certification program we have designed serves as an important means of creating a supply of Chinese teachers qualified to meet the increasing demands of the field.

Participants with Pennsylvania certification in another subject can become highly qualified to teach Chinese at the elementary and secondary levels in Pennsylvania after one summer (following successful completion of Chinese certification exams), while pre-service teachers will be prepared for continued Chinese certification education in the fall.

The Chinese Language Teachers' Institute is headed by Dr. Teresa Pica and Dr. Kathy Schultz, who have a combined 50 years of experience working with public school teachers and in the fields of language and literacy education. Since 1998, the Chinese Language Teachers' Institute has offered similar summer courses. It has served over 176 participants, many of whom are now certified in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. The institute has also accommodated participants from California, Washington DC, Delaware, Texas, Taiwan, and Brazil.

Qualified participants are eligible for tuition support through generous funding by the Freeman Foundation, New York and Stowe, Vermont. Please contact Maureen Cotterill, our Manager, for further details.

For more information, click here.

For an application, click here.