PREFACE

At a gathering of university teachers of Chinese language，a teacher，unsure of himself，casually and hesitantly aired an idea about publishing a book on teaching and learning of Chinese in an international context such as Australia.To his surprise，his idea started an earnest discussion.

There was an agreement among us that this would be a good opportunity for each of the contributors to reflect on our work as a teacher，and each of us could concentrate on one issue or aspect of Chinese teaching.Teachers at this gathering were mostly experienced teachers of Chinese.Some of us have been in the profession for a long time and some have been teaching Chinese for almost 30 years.It is time for us to look back at what we have been doing.

We hope this book is of some interest to people who teach Chinese，people who are training to be teachers of Chinese and people who would like to be teachers of Chinese in the international contexts.

This book contains fourteen articles on topics of a fairly wide range，from ecology of Chinese teaching and learning in an international context，creation of a productive learning environment and pedagogical re-imagining，to language class students placement，classroom language use and emotions in Chinese language learning，to culture and cinema in teaching Chinese，to teaching tones，Chinese characters and syntax，and to interpreting and translating as part of Chinese learning.

The process of writing this book has been a pleasant one of cooperation among contributors.Chapters in this book have all gone through a blind review process，in which every contributor has reviewed one or two chapters written by other contributors.We would like to acknowledge the effort and hard work every contributor has put into writing and reviewing chapters of this book.

We would like to thank Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press for publishing this book，and to Xin Yan of the Press who has overseen the publishing process of this book.

Guoqiang Liu，Shaoming Zhou and Hui Xu