AT the start of the upcoming academic year, students from the University of the West Indies (UWI) Western Jamaica campus will join their counterparts at Mona in being offered the chance to study Mandarin.

Dr Courtney Hogarth, director and lecturer at the Confucius Institute at UWI, said the time had come for the students in the west to benefit from the offerings of the foreign language department at the university.

“There is a growing need for students at the Western campus to be exposed to the offerings of Mandarin from the Confucius Institute as those at Mona do; so the department has made the arrangement to have a lecturer start providing our courses at the Western campus starting September,” said Dr Hogarth, who spent a number of years studying in China.

He added that it is only fair for the Confucius Institute, which was the first of its kind to be handed over to UWI Mona in February 2009 during President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Jamaica, to take its lecture room offerings being taught at the Mona campus to the Western campus.

“One of the reasons we decided to expand our services to the Western campus is in recognition of our five years of existence. We wanted to do something in recognition of that and given that our primary objective is to promote the learning of Chinese language and culture among Jamaicans, we decided to launch at the Western campus,” he said.

In addition to the semester course of Mandarin, the Confucius Institute’s western campus location will offer the Film of the Month Series held the last Friday of each month and the Anniversary Lecture each February.

The Confucius Institute operates in partnership with UWI and the College of International Education Exchange at the Taiyuan University of Technology (TUT) in Shanxi, China, and sponsored by the National Office of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (Hanban). The second institute was opened at the St Augustine campus in 2013.

— Ainsworth Morris