Last August 5, Professor Cynthia Y. Ning associate director of the Center for Chinese Studies and U.S. director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Hawaii at Manoa conducted a lecture at the Confucius Institute at Ateneo de Manila University in Manila, Philippines. The lecture, which was entitled "21st Century Learning and Task-based Mandarin Instruction" was jointly organized with the Ricardo Leong Center for Chinese Studies. This 3-hour lecture focused on performance-based Chinese language teaching for foreign learners.

There were more than 120 Chinese language teachers from 25 schools around the Philippines who attended this lecture. Professor Ning, who has taught courses in Chinese language and film for more than 25 years, first introduced "Five C Target-based Teaching Method" (Communications, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, Communities) which was initially developed by American scholars.

Afterward, she organized all the teachers into various activities based on different teaching objectives, while instructing how to follow the principles in teaching Chinese as a foreign language and how to apply them into practice.

All the attendants said that they had achieved a lot through this lecture and they were looking forward to more activities like this.