New Foreign Language Scheme in Wales and its implications for International Mandarin Teaching

New Foreign Language Scheme promulgated by the Welsh government is a new foreign language scheme for 2022-2025. This scheme seeks to build Wales into a multilingual country, make foreign language learners more competitive globally and promote the officialization and nationalization of foreign languages, so as to consolidate the status of foreign languages in Wales. Analyzing its overall design framework, contents and characteristics, this research absorbs the advanced foreign language teaching concepts of the scheme and discusses how language schemes will influence the international mandarin communication in this region in the future by taking international mandarin teaching in this policy as clues. In this way, it tries to promote close connections between international mandarin teaching and the teaching modules and objectives of the New Foreign Language Scheme for Welsh primary and secondary schools. According to the research, the international mandarin communication guided by the policy should obey the following rules. First, it should respect local language and culture, strike a balance between mandarin and local language and at the same time involve immigrants and international students in language promotion. Second, it should improve students’ ability in existing knowledge system, especially the thinking ability, communication ability, information and communication technology ability and digital ability. Third, it should strengthen students’ mandarin leaning and raise related career awareness, which means to let them recognize that learning mandarin can be favourable and provide more opportunities to their career. Forth, it should focus on cultivating the social and emotional skills of teachers and students, which requires to improve teachers’ sense of happiness in working and students’ sense of gain in career and highlight the role of teachers as guides and collaborators.