Teaching Culture in the Chinese Beginner’s Course:

A Case of the Practical Chinese Reader (I & II)

Wang Zhijun

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

It is generally agreed among second language teachers and educators that language and culture are interwoven together and language teaching should be accompanied by culture teaching (Crawford-Lange and Lange, 1984; Brown, 1994; Hadley, 2001). Battista (1984) argues that cultural skills should be the fifth skill after the other four language skills (speaking, listening, reading and writing). However, when or at what proficiency level, what kind of culture and how the culture content should be taught are still debatable issues.

This study addresses these issues in culture teaching in the Chinese Beginners’ course. I argue that we should include culture content in the second language class at the beginning level (Seelye, 1985) and culture teaching should be integrated into language teaching on a day-to-day basis because culture has been one of the motivations that draw students to foreign or second language classes (Botoman, 1982; Battista, 1984). In addition, the increasingly large number of Chinese heritage students in Chinese second language classes provides additional incentive for Chinese culture teaching, although it posts more challenges to Chinese educators because of the complexity and diversity in the cultural backgrounds of student populations.

The instructors should try their best to use every possibility to connect language and culture in teaching the four language skills. I believe that culture teaching is not only a cultural information instruction but also new intercultural personality training or cultural versatility developing (Robinson,1985), and sociolinguistic and sociocultural competence are as important as linguistic competence. In order to achieve these goals, culture content being taught should be limited to those cultural elements that are closely related to language, and language and cultural communication, especially those cultural elements that affect cross-cultural communication in both verbal and non-verbal terms (Zhang, 1988; 1997; Bonvillain, 2000).

It is my belief that the best method to teach culture through language is to use culturally authentic semantic domain and networks of relationships combined with cultural capsules, clusters, and minidramas to present vocabularies, sentences and dialogues. This would allow students to practice language skills and eventually to achieve linguistic and sociocultural competence. The following examples are the illustration of language based culture teaching in the textbook: Practical Chinese Reader (I & II). (1). Words, phrases and expressions that contain cultural connotations: sports, terms of address, surnames and titles, kinship terms, honorific terms; colors, food, flowers, drinks, place and building names, art and literature, transportation, clothing, money, etc; (2) verbal and non-verbal communication involving conventions or social customs such as greetings, time and space, leave-taking, gift-giving, introduction, dinner invitation, gesture and facial expressions, language taboos, etc.

In short, in order to meet the demands of the new development of second language education, culture teaching has become an indispensable part of language teaching and the language classroom is the best place to enhance students’ cultural awareness and develop multicultural personalities.