A Survey Of The Status Quo Of Private Chinese Education Institutions In The Netherlands

With China's continuous rising status in the world stage,the economic ties between the Netherlands and China become increasingly strengthened.Since 2003 the Netherlands has become and maintained the position of the 2nd largest trade partner with China in the European union,and the Chinese nationals living in the Netherlands have reach about 190,000.This leads to an ever-growing interest in Chinese language in the Dutch society.To date,40 privately operated Chinese teaching schools are formally registered in the Netherlands.The current thesis made an attempt to develop a general understanding of the status quo of these Chinese teaching schools by collecting and analyzing information from a typical school,namely,the Chinese school Heerlen.By research methods of questionnaire survey and direct interview,the author analyzed and discussed the different aspects of the school:students,teachers,textbooks used,teaching management,school house including teaching hardware,financial situation and feedback from the parents of students.Recommendations for improvement are provided.The thesis is organized as follows.Chapter 1 gives a brief overview of Chinese language education in the Netherlands and introduces some limited existing prior research work on this subject.The motivation of the current thesis including the used research method is also given.Chapter 2 describes the brief history of the Chinese school Heerlen and outlines its current situation as a non-profit organization.Chapter 3 consists of two parts with the first part devoted to investigating and analyzing the Chinese study reality of the students from three student-related aspects that can contribute to the language learning which include:basic profile,mother-tongue,and individuality.The second part focuses on the teaching staff factor and its impact on the teaching outcome.The existing challenges of the current teaching staff in the Chinese school Heerlen are pointed out and solutions to tackle the challenges are proposed.Chapter 4 discusses aspects including teaching materials,settings of class and curriculum as well as teaching management.It is noticed that there is a gap in the applicability of the teaching materials and teaching management,recommendations on improvement are given.Chapter 5 deals with teaching hardware including school house and budgeting situations.It is found that the school classroom utilization is not maximized and there is shortage in budgeting,which needs to be mitigated by optimizing assets utilization and moderately increasing tuition including looking for further financial sponsorship.Chapter 6 addresses the feedback from the parents of school students.Both satisfactory and unsatisfactory aspects from the parents are discussed and analyzed,with improvement solutions being provided.Chapter 7 concludes the thesis with a brief summary of the major findings of the research as well as pointing out the limitation of the current work.