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

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 paradigm-Performed 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. Review "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 "Foreign language acquisition and pedagogical research has clearly shown that our language curriculum should foster students' linguistic, socio-cultural and strategic competencies. However, when we examine the current practice of Chinese language pedagogy, we find that the development of socio-cultural competencies does not receive adequate attention in the language curriculum. Professor Chen's book is outstanding in that it helps enhance the part of the language curriculum that fosters the development of students' socio-cultural competence. She argues convincingly the importance to integrate culture in teaching Chinese as a foreign language at various levels and offers informative and practical suggestions on how to incorporate the teaching of Chinese culture in a Chinese curriculum."--Jianhua Bai, Kenyon College About the Author Guangyan Chen is an associate professor at Texas Christian University.