During the Fall 2015 semester, I had the opportunity to take a course in spoken Chinese from the Confucius Institute at the University of Oklahoma (OUCI). This course, called Great Wall Chinese, was not for credit and open to the public. It met twice weekly for just over an hour, and we learned quite a bit in a short amount of time. Since I know that Confucius Institutes can be a source of controversy, I thought I'd write up a piece about my experience from the student's perspective.

Confucius Institutes are organizations funded by the Chinese government that exist at a number of universities in the United States as well as abroad. They help to spread Chinese language and culture, which reminds me a bit of the Fulbright program. The biggest difference between the two that I noticed on the surface is that my Chinese teacher was an actual teacher instead of a confused 22 year old. I know that OUCI does language camps in the summer for elementary, middle, and high school students as well as sponsoring several cultural activities in Norman throughout the year. The teachers also teach the for credit Chinese courses at OU.

The BBC and Inside Higher Ed have both published pieces criticizing the program as being a tool that the Chinese government uses to promote its views abroad. China's controversial views on topics such as Taiwan coupled with the amount of money that China supplies to the universities that run these programs have made it a hot button issue in Chinese language education. It should be noted, however, that most of these issues come from the administrative side of things, which I had practically no dealings with while at OUCI.

My personal experience with the course was extremely positive. My instructor was a genuinely excellent teacher who was excited to teach us spoken Chinese. The class was fun, although a lot of that had to do with the non-credit aspect - not having tests or quizzes tends to make it a more relaxed environment! Although we didn't learn many characters, we all learned enough Chinese so that, as the teacher put it, we won't die if we go to China. We also discussed several festivals in China and learned some Chinese paper cutting.

The only critiques I can make based on my personal experience is that we looked at a map of China that included all the disputed areas such as Taiwan as part of the country, although we didn't discuss Taiwan at all. Additionally, once someone asked the teacher about the end of the one child policy and she didn't really want to discuss it. Besides that one instance, we never discussed politics at all in the class.

I really enjoyed learning Chinese at OUCI. The class only cost $30 for the entire semester, which is great value. I would love to enroll in the second part of the course in the spring. Unfortunately, it won't fit into my schedule, so I'm going to have to be content with continuing to learn out of my textbook.
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Link:
OU Confucius Institute