First Mandarin Chinese Auditorium Set Up at Moscow State Pedagogical University (MSPU) sponsored by the Republic of China (Taiwan)

The first Mandarin Chinese Auditorium sponsored by the Republic of China (Taiwan) has been set up in the Institute of Foreign Languages at Moscow State Pedagogical University (MSPU), a leading university in Russia, and began being used in December, 2017. The Mandarin Chinese Auditorium has been decorated with Taiwanese lanterns, New Year couplets, hanging scrolls, and Chinese knots. A total of 180 students from MSPU will attend classes in this auditorium each week - 150 from the Department of Comparative Linguistics, and the rest from other departments. The Education Division of the Taipei-Moscow Economic and Cultural Coordination Commission (TMECCC) hopes that having a dedicated Mandarin Chinese Auditorium will arouse students’ interest in learning Mandarin Chinese and culture and help to make Moscow State Pedagogical University a center and demonstration site, promoting Taiwan’s approach to teaching Mandarin Chinese. Three Taiwanese teachers of Mandarin Chinese (two of whom were sent by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China) are currently working at the institute, giving lectures on Chinese phonetics, grammar, translation, culture, and other subjects. Each of the teachers has up to 15 hours face-to-face teaching each week, which indicates the strong interest at MSPU in learning, and learning about, the Chinese language. Moscow State Pedagogical University is one of three leading pedagogical universities in the Russian Federation. It has 21,400 students from 75 regions of Russia and 1,300 foreign students from 40 countries, and it has nine institutes, 17 departments, 12 training and research centers. and 50 scientific schools. The university signed an MOU with National Taiwan Normal University in 2015, and the university’s first cooperative undertaking with TMECCC was the International Conference on Advanced Methodology of Natural Science from Asia held on one of its campuses in December, 2016. Photo:The first Mandarin Chinese Auditorium sponsored by the Republic of China (Taiwan) was set up in the Institute of Foreign Languages at Moscow State Pedagogical University.