Designated as Confucius Classroom in 2010 by Hanban-Asia Society Confucius Classrooms Network
Established in 1997, The Hill School's Chinese program has been a prophetic leader among its peer independent private boarding and day schools in offering Chinese language courses for its national and international student bodies. Growing from a single class and single-digit student enrollment, today's Chinese program has two full-time instructors and two language tracks: Chinese 1, 2, 3, and 4 Bridge; and 2Honors, 3Honors, 4AP, and 5Honors. For Chinese history and culture, the program now offers The Intellectual History of Ancient China, and Introduction to Dao De Jing and Chinese Sound and Script. Student enrollment has also been growing steadily. The percentage of students taking Chinese is about 10 to 15 percent from year to year.
The program's pedagogical approach is task-based, communicative, and mindful of its learners’ interests and cognitive development. Using a leading introductory Chinese textbook among high schools and universities around the world as its three-year sequence core curriculum, students gradually learn to cultivate a sophisticated sense of the language by making connections to, and expanding on, relevant linguistic information whenever and wherever appropriate along the evolution of the core curriculum. Such an instructional approach designed specifically for the unique nature of the language makes acquisition cognitively stimulating and natural.
The program has also been at the forefront of utilizing technology and
on-line resources to supplement limited classroom face-to-face time, to solidify different aspects of linguistic training, and to identify the degrees of learning effectiveness. The Chinese program continues to explore effective means of content delivery in order to accommodate its diverse student body with different learning styles and needs.
As part of the curriculum design and training, Chinese program students are well-adapted technology users, confident public speakers, and talented performers. Here are a series of
videos that give witness to their hard-earned yet triumphal ease and joy.