On November 12, 2023 “Chinese Teaching Heroes Conference” (Northwest Region) International Chinese Teaching Skills Exchange Activity was held in Xi’an International Studies University, which was attended by 24 teams of teachers and students from 19 institutions in Shanxi, Gansu and Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Recommended by the evaluation experts, the students team from Lanzhou University achieved a good result and entered the 2023 "Chinese Teaching Heroes Conference" national exchange program.

The Lanzhou University team is composed of 2022 Master’s students majoring in International Chinese Education, Han Yushan, Su Yila, Zhang Lei, Bao Jiali, and Wu Ting, with Associate Professor Deng Wenjing as the instructor. The team uses TPRS (Story-Reading Foreign Language Teaching Method) as the theoretical guidance, and “Traditional Chinese Stories”, a project supported by the Language Integration Center completed by Associate Professor Liu Xiaoyan and Professor Li Lifang of Lanzhou University, as the teaching material. The team conducts online teaching with intermediate and advanced international students as the teaching objects, aiming to cultivate Chinese learners' ability to express themselves in paragraphs.

Instructor Deng Wenjing and team members Han Yushan and Wu Ting went to Xi’an to attend the exchange meeting, and other students who were interning overseas watched the entire event through online live broadcast. At the exchange meeting, Han Yushan shared with teachers and students about the semester course theme “Reading Stories, Learning Chinese” and the teaching theme of this class “A Blessing in Disguise and the 5W1H Narrative Model” from the aspects of teaching philosophy, teaching design and teaching feedback.

The theme of this year’s Chinese Teaching Heroes Conference is "Creating High-Quality Chinese Classrooms". The meeting specially invited Professor Jiang Liping from Beijing Language and Culture University, Professor Zhang Hao from Beijing Language and Culture University, Professor Le Qi from Communication University of China, and Professor Zhao Wei from Xi'an Jiaotong University to provide expert comments. Each teaching team had solid teaching preparation, ingenious teaching design, distinctive teaching style, and good classroom presentation, which won applause from the observers and received high praise and unanimous affirmation from the commenting experts.

Professor Zhang Hao from Beijing Language and Culture University spoke highly of the course design of our team, saying that the course is “meticulous, exquisite and wonderful”, and that it has grasped the core points of Chinese learning for international students at the intermediate and advanced levels. The content design is very attentive, the teaching links are very complete, and the logic between each link is strong. Professor Zhang Hao especially affirmed the "5W1H" narrative model used by the team, and believed that it is an important innovation in teaching design.

It is reported that the 2023 “Chinese Teaching Heroes Conference” international Chinese teaching skills exchange event is jointly sponsored by the Chinese Language Exchange and Cooperation Center of the Ministry of Education and the National Chinese International Education Professional Degree Graduate Education Steering Committee. The event is divided into six regions: Northeast, North China, East China, Southwest, Northwest, and Central South. It aims to strengthen the construction of international Chinese education teaching staff and talent training, and build a new platform for international Chinese teachers to exchange teaching and share wisdom. The Lanzhou University students team showed a good spirit and gained valuable teaching experience in this exchange activity in the Northwest region. The team will go to Beijing in late December to participate in the national general exchange event.