The Confucius Institute at the University of Canterbury (CIUC) has hosted a series of Chinese teachers workshops in the South Island of New Zealand since the beginning of 2012. The first round of the workshops consists three sections focusing on Chinese phonetics and phonology, which started from the 28th of March 2012 through to late May, and which was presented by Dr Li Licheng, language instructor of CIUC.

The second round of the workshops was co-organized by CIUC and ILEP at the CIUC Resource Centre at Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology (CPIT) on 11th of August 2012. Ms Wang Yu, National Chinese language Adviser in New Zealand was the lecturer for the first section. The major topic for this section was "Introduction to the Intercultural Communicative Language Teaching (iCLT)". In order to provide a clear picture of iCLT to the teachers present, teachers were divided into groups to project teaching plans according to the concepts of iCLT and present them for further discussion. In addition to the practice of the theory, teachers also brought forward difficulties and problems that had occurred in their daily teaching into the discussion section. After warm discussion and exchange of ideas, some of the problems were well solved or answered. The workshop lasted from 9:00am to 4:30pm.

So far there have been more than 50 participants from local schools and institutions attended these workshops. Feedbacks from attendees were encouraging. Many teachers agree that this kind of training is beneficial for both teachers and schools in developing Chinese teaching and learning in the local areas. As is planned, more seminars on Chinese characters, vocabulary and grammar will be offered by CIUC during the second half of 2012.