Abstract
Culture has been considered a key component of foreign language teaching since the decade of the 60’s. The way culture has been conceptualized, nonetheless, has experimented a great change since that time, from encyclopaedic knowledge to habits and behaviours, to finally be considered as a group of key strategies and abilities (intercultural communicative competence), which allows students to deal with any new situation they might face in their intercultural encounters. The way Chinese culture is promoted to be taught from the theoretical research, mainly generated in China, is still strongly focused in the limited “culture as habits and behaviours” definition of the concept; however, at the very end, the way students conceive what culture is, highly depends on the vision that the teacher brings to his/her classroom. Understanding how culture teaching is managed is especially important in higher education, since the kind of competences developed by the students will affect their professional future; however, there is a considerable scarce of empirical studies on this area. This research considers approaches to culture concepts and culture teaching management taking place in Spanish universities with Chinese language studies during 2020. Chinese language teachers from different universities have participated in a survey about these two subjects, followed up by personal interviews to clarify some of the results. The conclusions of this pioneering research enables better understanding of how Chinese culture and Chinese culture teaching is actually approached in Spanish universities.
Presenters
Isabel María Balsas UreñaAssistant Teacher, General Linguistics and Theory of Literature, University of Granada, Spain
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Past and Present in the Humanistic Education
KEYWORDS
Chinese Culture, Culture Teaching, Chinese as a Foreign Language Teaching
