Introduction to the Special Issue of the Fourth International Symposium on Chinese Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (ISOCTAL-4)

at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom.This symposium series was established in 2015 and has become an advanced academic platform for cutting-edge research in Chinese theoretical and applied linguistics.Currently, the field of Chinese language teaching is thriving and growing rapidly around the world as well as in China itself.Chinese language teaching is not an isolated discipline; it is closely related to general linguistics, Chinese linguistics, comparative linguistics, and applied linguistics, informed by theories and research carried out not just in China but around the world, as represented in the range of papers presented here.As is well known, the practice of Chinese language teaching has a long history, but its development as an academic discipline began in the mid-20th century.Since that time, the increasing importance of teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages has highlighted the need for establishing good practice in Chinese language teaching.Additionally, the continuous development of Chinese linguistics in the international domain has provided a valuable foundation for the deepening of research into the theoretical foundations underlying Chinese language teaching.Looking at the development of Chinese linguistics, cross-cultural and cross-regional academic exchange has long been one of the prerequisites for the deepening of Chinese language research.In the early 20th century, Western scholars such as Klas Bernhard Johannes Karlgren (瑞典学者高本汉) from Sweden, Henri Maspero (法国学者马伯乐) from France, and James Mellon Menzies (加拿大学者明义士) from Canada made groundbreaking contributions to the fields of Chinese phonology, dialectology, and oracle bone script studies.With the vigorous development of Western structuralist and transformational generative linguistics during the 20th century, academic exchanges between China and the West have