On February 27 and 28, and March 1, 1999, the first Chinese Language Summit involving the leadership of CLASS and the Chinese Language Teachers Association (CLTA) convened at the National Foreign Language Center (NFLC) in Washington, D.C.. The Summit was initiated through the efforts of CLASS President Lucy Lee, CLTA Executive Director Madeline Chu, and NFLC Deputy Director (now Director) Richard Brecht, and was made possible through the financial support of NFLC.

The CLASS representatives were: Thomas Buckingham (Lee County Schools, FL), Phyllis Trautman Chen (Great Neck South H.S., NY), Carol Chen-Lin (Choate Rosemary Hall, CT), Lucy Lee (Livingston H.S., NJ), Hal Nicholas (Lee County Schools, FL), Chih-Wen Su (Amherst Regional H.S., MA) and Suzy Shen Zien (Bethesda-Chevy Chase H.S., MD). The CLTA representatives were: Madeline Chu (Kalamazoo College, MI), Chuanren Ke (University of Iowa), Scott McGinnis (NFLC/University of Maryland), Cynthia Ning (University of Hawai’i) and Galal Walker (The Ohio State University).

During the first two days of the Summit, the participants worked toward identifying what could be called five genuinely common priority areas for their two respective organizations, as well as proposing a number of possible solutions for achieving those goals. Those five priority areas are: (1) teacher training, (2) teacher and learner standards, (3) language skill assessment, (4) research and its application, and (5) program evaluation methodology. They then produced a joint working document which was presented and discussed during the final day of the Summit, when representatives of a number of federal departments and agencies and private funding organizations met with the Summit participants to explore the possibilities for gaining financial support.

Although no specific grant proposal was produced as a result of the Summit, the participants did commit in principle to the establishment of a field development initiative, with an office to be housed at NFLC, to serve as the facilitating and development center for a number of projects related to the above five priority areas. Such an office would not be meant to replace or compete with either CLASS or CLTA, but rather to supplement existing efforts in a more broad-based manner, beyond what the relatively limited personnel and financial resources of CLTA and CLASS could hope to achieve. Ultimately, such an office could expand service to the broader Chinese language pedagogical field to include the heritage language, government and private provider sectors.

In his new position as Senior Associate for Projects at NFLC, Scott McGinnis is preparing a more detailed report on the Summit (to be presented at this fall’s meeting of the CLTA Board of Directors) as well as developing the first of a series of grant applications in connection with NFLC’s LangNet project, a WWW-based system to enable the sharing of language learning and teaching resources nationwide. If you have any questions, you may contact him directly via e-mail at smcginnis@nflc.org, or via regular mail at:

National Foreign Language Center
1619 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Suite 400
Washington, DC 20036
Phone 202-667-8100
Fax 202-667-6907