Chinese schools typically teach both written and spoken Chinese. With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the United States, and has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK.[8] One of the teaching tools used widely in Chinese schools is the Pinyin system, also known as the official phonetic system for transcribing the Mandarin pronunciations of Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet which was developed in the 1950s based on earlier forms of romanization. It was published by the Chinese government in 1958 and revised several times.[9] The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted pinyin as an international standard in 1982.[10]