Opération Amérique: Québec’s Soft Power Applied to French Language Teaching in the United States

ABSTRACT

Opération Amérique refers to the coordinated efforts of René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois government beginning late 1970s to promote Québec’s interests in the United States. The general goals and strategies of Opération Amérique suggest that it presents a case of soft power. However, the specific actions implemented as well as their effects have barely been explored. An analysis of original documents pertaining to Opération Amérique indicates that specific groups in the United States—namely, French professors—were targeted with the hope that they would improve perceptions of Québec in the United States. An examination of French textbooks used in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s shows an increase in Canada/Québec content, which may reflect the influence of Opération Amérique on French teaching practices.     

‘Caught’ between foreign cultural and development policies: perspectives of German Studies and German as a foreign language in Africa

The promotion of the German language abroad and of German Studies plays a central role in German Foreign Cultural Policy. With regard to Sub-Saharan Africa, otherwise a peripheral region for foreign policy, German as foreign language is firmly established as second language after English. Learners especially in Francophone West and Central Africa have increased over the past decade. Numerous funding programmes and actions are supported by German nongovernmental organizations at college/university levels. But bilateral cooperation between German and African academic institutions are challenged both by negative perceptions of the ‘Global South’ among Western colleagues and by an infrastructure adverse to research and to career development in most African countries. Additionally, North/South relations are traditionally seen in terms of (under-)development by German institutions, effecting cooperation. The paper develops a differentiated picture of African Studies in Africa, and outlines benefits that can be attained through collaboration ‘at eye-level’.     

浅谈体态语在小学英语教学中的应用

体态语是语言的一种,属于非言语性的语言。它是由人的面部表情、身体姿势、肢体动作和体位变化而构成的种种图象符号。体态语是教学的一种辅助教学手段,在小学英语教学中有着极其重要的作用,有时甚至会“无声胜有声”。近年来,笔者在英语教学时,根据教材的内容,创设情景,注意挖掘教材中可用体态语教学的内容,激发了学生的学习积极性,促进了师生交流,提高了教学效率,取得了良好的效果。     

少数民族双语教育中的二语习得研究

我国语言学界研究少数民族双语教育中的二语习得规律才刚刚开始,借鉴国外这方面的研究成果有利于教师提高民族学生的二语水平。本文结合二语习得研究理论探讨我国民族双语教育中存在的问题。     

对外汉语文化教学对博物馆资源的利用问题研究

对外汉语文化教学是对外汉语工作中一个不可或缺的重要部分,然而在具体的对外汉语文化教学工作中也存在着不少问题和有待改良的地方。博物馆是一个重要的文化教育社会机构,其丰富的文化资源与对外汉语文化教学有着不同程度的契合之处。本文从对外汉语文化教学的需求与博物馆资源能为其提供的帮助出发,研究对外汉语文化教学对博物馆资源的利用问题。     

‘English Vinglish’ and Bollywood: what is ‘new’ about the ‘new woman’?

Bollywood’s transnational mechanisms offer a unique space to study gendered subjectivity. My article studies a specific Bollywood movie, English Vinglish (2012) to draw out the profile of the ‘new woman.’ Persistently, I question the ‘new-ness’ to the construction of women when the ‘new’ reiterates the values of tradition, nation, and family. The ‘new’ seems to exist as a particular and unique transaction between local traditions and the global spread of populations that make limiting conceptions of woman, nation, or family, anomalies in a world propelled by expanding market needs and demands. The ‘new’ while offering possibilities for women, concomitantly carries different exclusions based on class, religion, language, and other identities. Understanding the formation of gender under contemporary conditions of transnationalism requires attentiveness to an insidious partnership of possibilities and exclusions that makes it simplistic to think in terms of progress or regress.     

对高校教育中创新教育的思考

本文以建构主义理论为指导,提出培养人的创新能力是高校素质教育的本质内涵．培养具有创新精神的专门人才是高校实施创新教育的核心。     

浅谈新课程对农村中学外语教学所形成的挑战与思考

农村中学外语教学在新课程中将面临一系列新的挑战,如何认识与应对这些挑战,走出应试教学的阴影,适应课改新形势的发展需要,全面推行素质教育,大面积提高农村中学英语教学质量,有若干问题需要思考与解决。     

THE CONTINUING MODESTY OF HISTORY

The critique of conventional historical writing has been emergent for a century—it is not the work of a few—and it has immense practical implications for Western society, perhaps especially in English‐speaking countries. Involved are such issues as the decline of representation, the nature of causality, the definitions of identity or time or system, to name only a few. Conventional historians are quite right to consider this a challenge to everything they assume in order to do their work. The challenge is, why do that particular work at all? Understandably, historians have consolidated, especially in North America where empiricism and the English language prevail. But even there, and certainly elsewhere, and given the changes in knowledge and social order during the past century at least, the critique of conventional historical method is unavoidable. Too bad historians aren't doing more to help this effort, and by historians I don't mean the most of us who think constantly in terms of historical causality as we learned it from the nineteenth century and our teachers; by “historians” I mean the experts who continue to teach the young. A major roadblock to creative discussion is the fact that problems such as those just mentioned all exceed disciplinary boundaries, so investigation that does not follow suit cannot grasp the problem, much less respond to it creatively. Of course everyone is “for” interdisciplinary work, but most professional organizations, publications, and institutions do not encourage it, despite lip service to the contrary. Interdisciplinary work involves more than the splicing activity that is all too familiar in academic curricula. Crossing out of one's realm of “expertise” requires a kind of humility that does not always sort well with the kind of expertise fostered by professional organizations, publications, and institutions. And even the willing have trouble with the heady atmosphere outside the professional bubble. In such conditions key terms (“language,”“discourse,”“relativism,”“modernity,”“postmodernity,”“time,”“difference”) are pushed here and pushed there without gaining the focus that would lead to currency until finally the ostensible field of play resembles a gigantic traffic jam like the one that opens the film Fellini Roma. Discussion of these issues leads in the end to Borges and his story, ‘The Modesty of History,” from which the title of this essay is borrowed.     

大学生诚信危机与高校诚信教育

诚实守信是和谐社会建设的基本要求,也是每个人都应遵循的基本道德规范。目前,导致高校大学生诚信危机的原因是多方面的。加强大学生诚信教育,既要完善高校诚信教育体系,拓宽诚信教育的渠道,也应营造良好的诚信教育环境,用制度规范保障高品质诚信人才的培养。     

清末各省大学堂与现代中国大学的缘起

1901年9月,清廷应两广总督陶模奏请,谕令各省设大学堂,前因虽是戊戌变法期间康有为倡言在省会改书院为高等中学,却是混淆专门学的高等学与大学,令疆臣们进退维谷。袁世凯率先想出挂羊头卖狗肉之策,以大学的名义办中小学的正斋、备斋,化两难为两便。各省争相跟进,纷纷效法,上演了一出君臣之间心照不宣的闹剧。壬寅、癸卯学制拨乱反正,重回各省高等学堂的轨道。不过,作为普通学向专门学的过渡,来自日本特有的高等学堂究竟应该是一省教育的最高学府,还是大学堂的预科,直到民初仍然聚讼纷纭,摇摆不定。而各方就此展开的争论,对于时下平衡基础教育与高等教育的衔接,仍有借鉴作用。     

语言艺术在小学语文课堂中的运用技巧

语言是一门艺术。语文教学语言同时还是一种专业语言。它是教师引导学生认识客观世界的一种特殊形式的语言,是课堂教学的媒介和重要工具。     

The tyranny of transnational discourse: ‘authenticity’ and Irish diasporic identity in Ireland and England

Through the prism of current state discourses in Ireland on engagement with the Irish diaspora, this article examines the empirical merit of the related concepts of ‘diaspora’ and ‘transnationalism’. Drawing on recent research on how Irish identity is articulated and negotiated by Irish people in England, this study suggests a worked distinction between the concepts of ‘diaspora’ and ‘transnationalism’. Two separate discourses of authenticity are compared and contrasted: they rest on a conceptualisation of Irish identity as transnational and diasporic, respectively. I argue that knowledge of contemporary Ireland is constructed as sufficiently important that claims on diasporic Irishness are constrained by the discourse of authentic Irishness as transnational. I discuss how this affects the identity claims of second‐generation Irish people, the relationship between conceptualisations of Irishness as diasporic within Ireland and ‘lived’ diasporic Irish identities, and implications for state discourses of diaspora engagement.     

外语教育：考察晚清上海对外开放的一个视角

随着晚清上海国际化都市的日渐成型,孵育了一个不断成长的外语教育环境,上海社会学习外语的意识也不断加强.本文立足于晚清上海外语教育与晚清上海对外开放态势间的互动和俱进关系,透过对教会学校、本土学校和非正规化教育等途径的外语教育进行考察,提供了观察晚清上海对外开放的另一个重要视角.     

论华文教育的定位及其发展趋势

有关华文教育的定位,历来是一个很有争议的问题。华文教育涉及诸多的学科、政府与民间部门以及复杂多变的国际关系和各国社会状况、教育文化政策等,我们应对以上诸多因素给以全面、充分的重视。本文据此提出,华文教育应分属海外华人的民族文化教育、政府的侨务工作、中国的对外汉语教学以及华侨华人研究等几个领域。同时,华文教育自身的这种复杂性,也决定了其在今后一个时期的发展趋势,主要表现在低龄学生人数增加、华文学校功能进一步扩大、教学中的语言文字更加统一以及华文教育社会化并逐步进入所在国主流教育系统等方面。