Chinese Language Framework

CONFUCIUS INSTITUTE

For NZ Primary Schools
(Year 1-8)

The current New Zealand Curriculum contains generic guidelines for Learning Languages and specifies Proficiency Descriptors for Curriculum Levels 1-8. Chinese in the New Zealand Curriculum, 1995 is outdated and there has been no replacement document offering teachers of Chinese a curriculum framework to guide their planning. The Confucius Institute in Auckland has been working closely with local Chinese language teachers to develop a Chinese language framework for primary schools (year 1-8).

The framework document developed is the result based on a draft created in 2016, which has been trialed by many teachers in the last two years. As stated in the introduction, the Confucius Institute in Auckland hopes the document will provide “a framework and guide for teachers to plan and implement a long term Chinese programme at the primary level, years 0-8.”

According to the Ministry of Education’s June 2017 statistics, 64,874 primary school students (from year 1 to year 8) in 354 schools are learning Chinese. It makes Chinese the highest ranked ‘foreign’ language taught in New Zealand schools. The framework provides a guide to support teachers in the development of Chinese in their schools and instructing their students.

The Chinese Language Framework document is free for download below.