Education experts propose enhancing international sharing, collaboration

Addressing the issues of diversity and globalization, practitioners from language and cultural organizations have proposed enhancing international collaboration and cultural exchanges with positive attitudes.

Eight experts from across Asia, Europe and the Americas proposed allying more organizations to establish a bigger network in order to provide long-term support for training programs for language teachers, sharing information and resources, and promoting international cooperation on a larger scale.

The idea was proposed at a roundtable dialogue discussing cultural exchanges and regional cooperation among countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative at the 2023 Belt and Road Forum for Language and Culture Collaboration on Monday.

According to the experts, countries were confronting different cultural and language challenges in their own national contexts.

Ika Lestari Damayanti, coordinator of the cooperation and collaboration division of the Association for the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language in Indonesia, spoke of the difficulty in understanding in a country where 300 million people speak more than 700 dialects.

Ahmed Bashir, president of Bangladesh English Language Teachers' Association, was concerned about the indigenous and minority languages in the country, as 98 percent of citizens speak the official language, Bengali. He stressed the pivotal role of a nonprofit, nonpolitical and voluntary network in addressing problems facing different countries.

"A positive attitude brings about positive actions," said Mira Namsrai, president of the English Language Teachers' Association of Mongolia, who proposed shifting the original teacher-centered teaching model to a student-centered one with the concerted efforts of language teachers worldwide, to inspire the learning enthusiasm and promote student initiative.

Li Menghan contributed to this story.