A Comparative Study Of The Operation Of The Confucius Institute And The Language And Cultural Dissemination Institutions Of The Four Countries

Global development is an irresistible trend in today's world.The connections among countries in various fields such as economy,culture and education are constantly increasing.Therefore,countries are more aware of the importance of language and culture communication and upgrade it to the height of national strategy.As a language and culture communication institute of China,the Confucius Institute undertakes great responsibility of promoting the spread of the Chinese language in the world and strengthening the cultural exchanges and cooperation between China and other countries since 2004.It presents the image of China and also offers a window for the foreign people to learn about China.After 15 years of hard work,Confucius Institute have made remarkable achievements and took root in 154 countries.Nowadays,the development of Confucius Institute has stepped into a new stage of structure upgrading,which faced with a series of problems such as quality improvement,management efficiency improvement and function extension.Therefore,a comparative study on the operation of Confucius Institute with the four well-developed language and cultural communication institutes in the world will be beneficial to future development of Confucius Institute.This paper adopts the methods of literature analysis,quantitative research and global comparison to introduce and compare the operation concept,modes of establishment and operation situation of the five language and cultural communication institutes:Confucius Institute,Goethe Institute,Alliance Francaise,British Council and Instituto Cervantes.After the detailed comparison,the following problems are found in the operation and management of Confucius Institue:1.The organizational structure of the Confucius Institute headquarters is incomplete.Some key departments are missing,such as the market research department,and the effective cooperation amoung departments is not enough.Besides,the centralization and decentralization between the headquater and the Confucius Institutes have not been effectively coordinated.2.The source of finance is limited,mainly relying on government support,thus making marketization unsufficient.3.The absorption of local social resources is relatively low,and the cooperation is mostly confined to language teaching and cultural communication,short of innovation.4.In terms of regional source allocation,there is a lack of regionalization research,which leads to the problems of uneven resouece distribution,resource waste and low efficiency of resource utilization.5.In the aspect of performance evaluation,the evaluation method is not scientific and effective and the way of evaluation is too simple.The evaluation results fail to enlighten the long-term development in the future.Based on the above findings,this paper proposes specific optimization strategies:1.Optimize organizational structures:merge the departments with high correlation and create market-related departments;introduce regional management and build regional entity centers.2.Broaden sources of funding:increase profits by charging service fees,selling products and raising examination fees;enhance brand quality to attract social resources and establish long-term cooperation.3.Deepen cooperation:target potential partners and widen service area;develop online courses,learning software and build "digital space" with other language and cultural communication institutes.4.Optimize allocation of resources:increase the cooperation between Confucius Institute and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs;analyze the features of each region and enhance the flexibility of cooperation.5.Build up a scientific system of performance evaluation:collect information by regular research and take the research data seriously;carry out the evaluation in a variety of ways,such as index-oriented evaluation,objective-oriented evaluation,thematic evaluation,and evaluation taken by experts or the third party.These optimization strategies are based on comparison and analysis between Confucius Institute and other four language and cultural communication institutes,hoping to provide some advice for the future development of Confucius Institute.