A Probe Into The Spreading Strategies Of Chinese Course In Confucius Institutes From The Perspective Of Audience

In order to help Hanban spread the brand image of Confucius Institute(CI) and increase the registration rate of its Chinese course, the author utilized communication theories as a framework and used an audience-oriented paradigm to explore factors, such as interests in learning Chinese, motivation of taking Chinese courses and the social environment, that affect audiences’ cognition of the Chinese courses and their information processing system. The author focused on the University of West Florida(UWF) as a case of example and conducted focus group interviews with the target audiences of its CI Chinese language courses.The research results showed that, even though most of the audiences are interested in learning Chinese, only a few of them are willing to take the Chinese courses. The appeals of “free courses” and “the awards of free trip to China” are effective to those people who have already had the motivation to take the Chinese courses, but not those who are only interested in learning Chinese. From the perspective of cross culture communication, the differences between Chinese culture and the American culture inspire audiences’ interests in learning Chinese. And more importantly, according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory, the reasons of learning Chinese can be classified into the needs of love and belonging, the needs of esteem and the needs of self-actualization. The hierarchies of needs are different; and therefore, the audiences’ interests are different. On the other hand, audiences’ motivation to learn Chinese is mainly influenced by their evaluation of self-efficacy in learning Chinese, while their cognition of the Chinese courses is strongly affected by their previous experiences of learning Chinese or any other second language.Base on these findings, the author suggested to change the appeals to enhance the higher hierarchy of needs, to add encouragements in propagations as a way to help audience build confidence, and to emphasize the strength of CI’s Chinese courses so as to change audience misunderstandings of the courses.