Palgrave Studies in Teaching and Learning Chinese – serie

This book presents a thought-provoking challenge to mainstream theories of second language learning. This intriguing book will interest students and scholars of language education, and offers practical advice for those involved in teaching and learning Chinese as a foreign language.

This book presents a thought-provoking challenge to mainstream theories of second language learning. This intriguing book will interest students and scholars of language education, and offers practical advice for those involved in teaching and learning Chinese as a foreign language.

The author argues persuasively that second language teaching practices and policies must reflect the current reality of language use and the diverse learning needs of multilingual students.This book will appeal to teacher educators and researchers in fields such as second language acquisition, foreign language teaching and language policy.

This book seeks for an alternative perspective in analysing cultural phenomena to supplement the norm of Western dominant theorising and conceptualisation. It engages notions and concepts of culture developed by Chinese cultural theorists when addressing Chinese teachers’ cross-cultural experiences in Australian school settings.

This book reports the results of an ethnographic study, focusing primarily on the experiences of four teachers of the Chinese language in Australian secondary schools. The author creates an audience for their voices as they reflect on their own understandings of culture, language teaching, and culture in language teaching through semi-structured interviews, and compares these reflections with written stimulus dialogues designed to elicit 'culture-in-language' reflections, as well as curriculum and policy documents produced by the Australian government. The book's findings indicate that teachers of the Chinese language are diverse in their views on culture, language teaching, and the ways in which culture can or should inform language teaching, and the author argues that language teacher intercultural competence cannot be assessed through a synthesis of the current English-only research literature. This book will be of interest to teachers and teacher trainers of Chinese as a foreign language, as well as students and scholars of applied linguistics and language education more broadly.

This book will be of interest to applied linguists, pre-service and in-service language teachers, as well as students and scholars of Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages (TCSOL).