Performed Culture in Chinese Language Education: A Culture-Based Approach for U.S. Collegiate Contexts

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Performed Culture in Chinese Language Education: A Culture-Based Approach for U.S. Collegiate Contexts elaborates on a cultural awareness-oriented, cultural performance-based, and cross-cultural communication-focused foreign language pedagogical paradigmPerformed Culture Approach in the context of U.S. collegiate Chinese language education. Guangyan Chen draws on the data collected through questionnaires, comparisons between this pedagogy and mainstream pedagogical frameworks, and analyses of curricular development, lesson plans, and classroom discourses. Chen promotes the performed culture approach by delineating the theoretical framework of this pedagogy, reporting studies that empirically support cultural primacy in Chinese language education, and illustrating this pedagogy through analyses of a curricular structure, a lesson plan, and classroom discourses. Chen shows how this pedagogy addresses the gaps between the social need for global citizens and the insufficient integration of culture into foreign language education. The performed culture approach also addresses the overall drop in U.S. collegiate foreign language enrollment as this pedagogy connects foreign language programs to university missions and social needs.

Reviews

"Although foreign language professionals all agree that culture instruction is important in language instruction, the field of foreign language education has yet to find an effective pedagogical framework to truly integrate culture instruction with language instruction. This book has provided both theoretical and empirical grounds for a culture-based language pedagogy and argued convincingly that the Performed Culture Approach (PCA) holds the potential to change the mindset and practices of Chinese language teachers, and perhaps for other languages as well. The link between a culture-based language pedagogy and global citizenship proposed by the author is sure to revitalize the field of foreign language education in the years to come." -- Li Yu, Williams College

Author Bio

Guangyan Chen is an associate professor at Texas Christian University.