Ruan Jiening, Zhang Jie, Leung Cynthia B. (eds.) Chinese language education in the United States

Springer International Publishing, 2016. — xv, 250 p. — (Multilingual Education, Volume 14) — ISBN: 9783319213088.Chinese language education (CLE) for foreigners witnessed its most rapid growth after the turn of the twenty-fi rst century both in China and in the United States. With China becoming an increasingly infl uential world economic and politicalpowerhouse in the last decade, CLE has gradually attracted more attention from governments, business sectors, and education communities in many countries around the world. An increasing number of universities, colleges, and K-12 schools have also begun to offer Chinese classes to their students over the last 10 years. The growing popularity of CLE is a new trend in foreign language education in many parts of the world. As an emerging fi eld whose “research tradition is still developing” (Ke 2012, p. 44), it is not surprising that our understanding of CLE is still rather limited. Most published research in the fi eld is either linguistic or acquisition studies of Chinese or individual cases of teaching techniques and pedagogical strategies. There is a general lack of a coherent body of CLE research and theories that can provide educators, practitioners, and especially preservice and novice teachers with an overarching picture of the current state of CLE to guide Chinese language teaching and learning in practice.