Jeonbuk National University (JBNU) Professor Yongjin Park (Department of Chinese Language & Literature, College of Humanities) has been awarded the 'Confucius Academic Award', presented by the Korean Association for Chinese Studies to outstanding researchers in the field of Chinese studies.

The award was established in 2022 by the Korean Association for Chinese Studies and the Dong-A University Confucius Academy to discover and encourage outstanding scholars who have contributed to the advancement of Chinese studies and to publicize their achievements.

It is a prestigious award given annually to the most outstanding paper among all research articles published in the field of Chinese studies during the previous year. The selection comprehensively evaluates originality, academic contribution, and potential for future development.

Professor Park, whose primary research areas are pedagogical grammar of Modern Chinese and language contact, has continued to conduct empirical research that connects theory and practice in Chinese language education, including the design of systems for grammatical difficulty levels.

In the paper 'On the Use of '語素' and '詞素' as Translations of 'Morpheme' in Modern Chinese,' published in Volume 85 of Journal of Chinese Studies in 2024, Professor Park systematically analyzed the mixed use of the central Chinese linguistics concepts '語素' and '詞素' and conducted a precise comparative analysis of their correspondence with the general linguistic concept of morpheme.

Also this year, through 'A Study on the Generation of Chinese Variant-Structure Sentences Using Generative AI,' he expanded theory-centered grammatical research for the AI era and proposed a direction for interdisciplinary research integrating Chinese language education and language engineering.

The review committee explained the selection by stating, 'Professor Park's research fundamentally redefines core concepts of Chinese grammar while representing a highly original attempt to incorporate cutting-edge AI technologies into scholarly analysis,' and added that it 'is the most outstanding achievement in terms of academic contribution and future extensibility among the papers published in 2024.'

To date, Professor Park has published more than 50 research articles in major journals such as Chinese Language Research and Chinese Language Education and Research. He has authored 19 books, including single-authored and translated works such as Chinese Language Teaching Theory, Theory and Practice of Chinese Language Education, and Reading Wang O Cheonchukgukjeon.

Professor Park expressed his gratitude, saying, 'I am deeply grateful for the high recognition of the long-term research I have conducted on Chinese pedagogical grammar,' and added, 'I will continue to strive to create a new model for Chinese language education and linguistics research required in the AI era.'

Meanwhile, founded in 1983, the Korean Association for Chinese Studies is the largest Chinese studies society in Korea, with approximately 1,000 Chinese studies researchers participating. It publishes the Korea Research Foundation–indexed journal Chinese Studies quarterly and leads the academic development across all areas of Chinese studies, including language, literature, culture, and social sciences.