CRI听力:Mandarin learning picking up popularity in the UK

The UK's Department for Education made an announcement earlier this year that it will invest 10 million pounds into a Mandarin excellence programme and by the year 2020 the programme will see at least 5,000 pupils across England using the Chinese language fluently.

The programme is being supported by a number of organizations including the UCL Institute of Education, which is also the lead body of a network of 42 Confucius Classrooms across England.

One of the Confucius Classrooms is based in St Catherine's College in Eastbourne in south east England. The College is also the only state school that teaches Mandarin as a second language along with French and Spanish in the region. Mark Talbot is the Principal of the College.

"There is a lot of pressure in a good way from the government to encourage children to study languages. And I think Mandarin is a language that will certainly have a lot of relevance for young people."

The Department for Education said in its announcement about the Mandarin excellence programme that Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world, and is seen as important for young people in the UK to master, in order for the country to remain globally competitive in the future. The programme will also train at least 100 new Mandarin teachers as part of the Education Department's effort to improve the quality of Mandarin education.

St Catherine's College in Eastbourne has also been in contact with the Mandarin excellence programme and as the school's Principal, Mr. Talbot believes the government's initiative will help in "raising the bar in terms of the importance of Mandarin."

"If you know that it(Mandarin teaching) is very much on the national agenda, you will feel confident, if you are offering it, that it's going to count towards better performance of the children, which is obviously an important aspect of running any school."

The Principal said St Catherine's Mandarin teaching profile has expanded since 2012 when they opened the Mandarin Classroom for the first time, and currently, a group of older pupils are considering Mandarin for their GCSE exams.

While Mandarin learning is fast picking up popularity in state schools, the study of Chinese in private schools in the UK is by no means lagging behind. Not only did they start Mandarin teaching early, private schools are also introducing the Chinese language to students at much younger ages.

Kensington Wade, an English Chinese dual language school due to be opened in April 2017, aims to foster an interest in Mandarin from toddler pupils. Professor Hugo de Burgh is the co-founder of the school and an expert on China at the University of Westminster.

"We are an immersion school, this is the first immersion school in Europe as far as we know. 'Immersion' meaning you do everything in two languages. There are of course French schools, German schools, Korean schools, Japanese schools and Italian schools, there are lots of different kinds of schools in Britain, but this is the only immersion school and we think it will be the first of many."

Beside local British pupils, the school also hopes to attract children from mixed backgrounds such as Chinese ex-pats and foreign families living in London.

In an ambitious plan set out by former Prime Minister David Cameron in 2014, the UK government intends to double the number of people learning Mandarin from 200,000 to 400,000 by 2020.