Teaching Chinese in a Digital Age: Legal and Policy Considerations in Alignment with the Paradigm Shift

The development of new internet technologies has brought about the digitalization of education. Digital education has created new opportunities and challenges for classroom teaching. Fully or partially online instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic and the post-pandemic online and hybrid teaching models have dramatically changed pedagogical approaches. Facing this paradigm shift in classroom teaching, instructors have adjusted their roles and functions in the digital environment. This paper explores teaching Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) in the United States classrooms from this new perspective, focusing on the legal and policy considerations caused by the shift to digital teaching and learning. It contributes to the emerging research on CFL teaching in the U.S. conducted by native Chinese teachers (NCTs), including the heritage speakers and the visiting teachers recruited from China, in the digital environments. This article will identify and analyze the legal issues and policies that are related to online and blended CFL teaching, such as protecting students’ personal information, fair use of copyrighted works, and ownership of online lecture content. It shows how NCTs will need to add legal and policy issues to the long list of challenges they must address in their teaching. The paper concludes with tentative recommendations about how NCTs can overcome these challenges, highlighting the importance of such strategies as improved training through pre-job orientation and job-embedded professional learning communities, efforts to gain greater awareness of their rights and responsibilities under law and policies, and close attention to policies concerning use of generative AI in digital teaching.