At a time when language enrollments are rising at four-year colleges around the country, DePaul University’s modern languages department has received significant resources from the Chinese government to assist with the development of a Chinese language program major.

The support for DePaul consists of a full-time visiting professor of Chinese, who will begin his tenure at DePaul in the winter quarter when the program is launched, and more than 1,000 Chinese-language books and teaching materials for the university’s library.

The Rev. John P. Minogue, C.M., out-going DePaul president, will formally accept the support from Chinese Consul General Xu Jinzhong at a reception June 10. The Chinese Consul for Education Zhu Hongqing also will attend the event, as well as John Kordek, the university's associate vice president of external relations.

“This program has been a long time in the making,” said Mark Johnston, chair of modern languages. “This major gift from the Chinese government enhances our ability to teach history, culture, religious studies, literature and language at the advanced level.”

Currently, the program has one language instructor, Xu Yingcai, who also serves as the director of DePaul’s language lab. According to Johnston, the strongest interest for this new program will be in the business arena and in education. He said that DePaul’s School of Education also has been pushing for a four-year Chinese language degree program because of increasing demand for Chinese teachers in the Chicago Public Schools and other area school districts.

DePaul’s modern languages department has the distinction of offering the only undergraduate major in Japanese in the Chicago-metropolitan area. Japanese is another language that has grown increasingly popular in the last decade.

For more information about DePaul’s Chinese language program or other language programs, visit the modern languages Web Site at http://condor.depaul.edu/~mol/ or call the department office at 773/325-7320.