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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2008-10-15 Daily Xml
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CONFUCIUS INSTITUTE, ADELAIDE UNIVERSITY

The Hon. L. STEVENS (Little Para) (15:54): Last week I had the honour and pleasure of leading a delegation of school principals to China, under the auspices of the Confucius Institute of the University of Adelaide. The delegation spent most of its time in Jinan, the capital city of Shandong province with whom South Australia has a sister state province relationship.

The purpose of the visit was to offer principals a tour of schools currently teaching Mandarin Chinese or that are about to embark on the teaching of Chinese to their students. The purpose of the visit was to, first, give them a first-hand introduction to China and Chinese culture and, secondly, to make contact with Chinese schools in order to set up contacts for future relations.

The members of the delegation came from a range of different schools which I will name: Salisbury High School; Trinity College North Campus; Thebarton Senior College; Highgate Primary School; Magill Primary School; St Peter's Collegiate Girls' School; Stradbroke Primary School; and Craigmore High School—a good mix of high schools, middle schools, primary schools, private schools and state schools. It was a very successful tour, indeed.

I will speak about three things, in particular. First, the main activities of specific value for the future involved a visit to Shandong University. Shandong University is the partner university with the University of Adelaide in relation to our particular Confucius Institute. It has 50,000 students, it is one of China's top universities, and it has a very large college of international education.

During the visit, delegates sat in on Chinese language classes. We had to divide into smaller groups to go to various Chinese language classes that were being scheduled where we witnessed teachers of the university teaching English to students from a wide range of countries: Asia, Africa, Russia and Europe. We were informed that that university has hundreds of people coming to learn Chinese from across the world. The other interesting thing about the university is its move to teach courses in English.

I will mention two visits: to the Hongjialou No.  2 Primary School and the Licheng No. 5 Middle School. Both were excellent visits of four to five hours each and, during those visits, teachers observed classes and noted that there were 64 students in the middle school classes for English and 36 students in the primary school classes, and, of course, methodologies that were constrained by that number.

As a result of those visits, a whole range of contacts have been made and I am very confident that, in future years, we will see student exchanges, teacher exchanges and a lot of good relationships being established between those particular South Australian schools and Chinese schools. This is the first of such visits provided by the Confucius Institute and I know that they intend to do more into the future.

Time expired.

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