The Investigation Of Chinese Learning Website—Confucius Institute Online

With the “Global Chinese Fever” effect hotting up, Chinese, a language with the first largest number of language users, has been growing more and more popular in the world. Especially in recent years, the use of the internet and mobile devices makes Chinese learning more convenient and popular, to meet the growing demands of Chinese learners. Nowadays, online learning has been increasingly becoming one of the real-time, convenient and efficient ways of Chinese learning. As a consequence, many Chinese learning websites has been established successively such as “eBLCU”, “Hschinese”, “Confucius Institute Online”, “Chinesepod”, “Myechinese”, “Greatwallchinese”, “eChinese Learning”, and “Yes-chinese”,etc.Confucius Institute Online is an authoritative Chinese learning website established and managed by Confucius Institute Headquarters(Hanban). Since its birth in 2008, it has attracted many Chinese learners, who have benefited from its big scale, abundant resources and varieties of content, eventually making it one of the outstanding comprehensive Chinese teaching and learning websites. Actually, not only does Confucius Institute Online provide a convenient and efficient E-learning platform for Chinese learners, but also helps the overseas promotion of Chinese culture, and above all, it contributes to strengthening friendships between China and the world.However, it is worth noting that the quality of Chinese learning website varies in spite of many varieties of the websites in China. Some of the Chinese learning websites are faced with problems in some aspects such as curriculum setting, management, and inevitably they need improving. Confucius Institute Online, through many times of upgrades and renovations, has become a relatively satisfactory and effective Chinese learning and communication platform. However, flaws and imperfectness still exist, which needs paying attention to and improving. As a new window of Chinese promotion, Confucius Institute Online has played a vital role in the whole construction of Confucius Institute, Chinese E-teaching as well as cultural communication. Therefore, it has very important sense to analyze, investigate and evaluate Confucius Institute Online.Based on American E-learning Certification Standards, E-teaching Evaluation System from Niu Yan and Nine Criteria For Evaluating Educational Websites from Kelli Boklaschuk & Kevin Caisse as well as some previous research on evaluating Chinese learning websites, this thesis adopts the observation method, content analysis method, measurement scale method and interview method to put forward an evaluation criteria of Confucius Institute Online in full consideration of the characteristics of second language teaching websites. Using the evaluation criteria, this thesis devotes to analyzing and investigating Confucius Institute Online from three aspects of content, technology and effectiveness. Furthermore, combined with the experience of registered users and the author’s practical experience in teaching Chinese as a foreign language in Korea, data processing is carried out with SPSS to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of Confucius Institute Online and meanwhile some possible suggestions are given for its future development.It is widely acknowledged that the Confucius Institute Online has some advantages in resource richness, website security, and visual effects of web interface. However some aspects such as resource updating speed, section design, and aid-answer system still needs improving and optimized.In the end, it is believed that Confucius Institute Online is promising and we have a lot to do to it. Hopefully, the evaluation criteria and some possible suggestions given in this thesis will benefit the future upgrading and improvement of it.