This book integrates culture and authenticity into Chinese classroom practice through exploring the potential of contemporary TV drama as teaching and learning materials for intercultural Chinese language teaching and learning. In addressing the four main challenges in culture teaching in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (TCFL), this book focuses on precisely this area of pedagogical practice in Chinese as foreign language education and draws on a wide interdisciplinary base, including foreign language education, cultural studies, and intercultural communication to explore the potential of authentic TV drama as language and culture materials for revitalising TCFL and foreign language teaching more generally. It examines in detail the culturally shaped beliefs, values, and practices that give meaning to the action and language of the selected clips in a modern, award-winning Chinese TV drama. This book shows a potential experiential pathway into (pedagogical) practices to bring contemporary culture into classrooms, to engage learners with contemporary and authentic texts, and to encourage inquiry-focused teaching practices, which – in being intercultural – allow for learners’ own interpretations of cultural messages in interaction and to recognise learners as learning to understand their own values and beliefs as they learn to explore those of other cultures.

Online Chinese Learning aims to investigate the types of language learning strategies (LLSs) that online Chinese learners use across asynchronous and synchronous learning environments in different learning contexts. This book examines how the use of language learning strategies by online Chinese learners is influenced by the interactants; the characteristics of the specific learning context; and selected individual learner characteristics. This book will provide: (1) new and detailed information about students’ LLS use in online Chinese learning; (2) insights into how individual students adopt LLSs and technological tools to solve learning problems in various learning contexts; (3) an exploration of factors influencing LLS use; and (4) recommendations regarding LLS adoption, use, and training. This book will be a valuable resource for university instructors in languages, language teaching methods, and second language acquisition, as well as researchers in languages, linguistics, and language learning and teaching.

This book explores the political, economic, and cultural forces, locally and globally that have shaped the evolution of Chinese primetime television dramas, and the way that these dramas in turn have actively engaged in the major intellectual and policy debates concerning the path, steps, and speed of China’s economic and political modernization during the post-Deng Xiaoping era. It intertwines the evolution of Chinese television drama particularly with the ascendance of the Chinese New Left that favors a recentralization of state authority and an alternative path towards China’s modernization and China’s current administration’s call for building a "harmonious society." Two types of serial drama are highlighted in this regard, the politically provocative dynasty drama and the culturally ambiguous domestic drama. The book also provides cross-cultural comparisons that parallel the textual and institutional strategies of transnational Chinese language TV dramas with dramas from the three leading centers of transnational television production, the US, Brazil and Mexico in Latin America, and the Korean-led East Asia region. The comparison reveals creative connections while it also explores how the emergence of a Chinese cultural-linguistic market, together with other cultural-linguistic markets, complicates the power dynamics of global cultural flows.

This book focuses on the rapidly changing sociology of music as manifested in Chinese society and Chinese education. It examines how social changes and cultural politics affect how music is currently being used in connection with the Chinese dream. While there is a growing trend toward incorporating the Chinese dream into school education and higher education, there has been no scholarly discussion to date. The combination of cultural politics, transformed authority relations, and officially approved songs can provide us with an understanding of the official content on the Chinese dream that is conveyed in today’s Chinese society, and how these factors have influenced the renewal of values-based education and practices in school music education in China.

Grounded in analysis of Chinese and international educational concepts and classroom techniques currently used to teach Chinese as a Second Language, and a thorough review of recent research in the field, this volume identifies the learning challenges of the language for native English speakers. Orton and Scrimgeour assess the gap in knowledge and skills between learners’ initial and future proficiency levels as L2 Chinese speakers, map their needs as learners towards achieving a high language proficiency, and set out an informed, integrated teaching orientation and practice for the Chinese classroom that responds to those needs. Chapters in the volume address curriculum design, teaching diverse learners and levels, the learning challenges of Chinese oral and literacy skills, grammar and vocabulary, discourse development, cultural understanding, and the affordances of a visit to China. Filled with original and engaging teaching and learning tools and techniques, this book is an essential and rich content resource for primary and secondary teachers, and teacher candidates and educators in Chinese as a Second Language education.

Ma looks at the ways in which the identity of Hong Kong citizens has changed in the 1990s especially since the handover to China in 1997. This is the first analysis which focuses on the role, in this process, of popular media in general and television in particular. The author specifically analyses at the relationship between television ideologies and cultural identities and explores the role of television in the process of identity formation and maintenance.

Against the background of the Australian government’s strategic plan to promote Asian languages in schools, this book is an innovative autoethnographic inquiry into what actually occurs in the implementation of a Chinese language and culture program in an Australian context. Drawing on eight years of socio-cultural and educational fieldwork in a primary school, Chunyan Zhang examines complex, fluid and heterogeneous daily teaching practices and the ways in which ideas of China are assembled, presented and performed. She asks the following questions: What is China? Where does Taiwan fit into the China depicted in a multicultural, globalised classroom? Can Chinese communism or Chairman Mao be avoided in teaching English-speaking learners? What kind of China is brought in here while what kind of China is being silenced and othered? Through the partial connection between method assemblage and Daoist concepts, Zhang develops a water-like pedagogy in teaching. She uses the knowledge flow model to examine the imbalanced knowledge flow within teacher-student interactions. From finding China as a hybrid assemblage to proposing China as method, Zhang’s investigation makes an important contribution to the sociology of Chinese language education. This book is an essential and rich content resource for primary and secondary teacher education and research, teacher candidates and educators in Chinese as a second language education.

Offering the first systematic overview of modern and contemporary Chinese literature from a translation studies perspective, this handbook provides students, researchers and teachers with a context in which to read and appreciate the effects of linguistic and cultural transfer in Chinese literary works. Translation matters. It always has, of course, but more so when we want to reap the benefits of intercultural communication. In many universities Chinese literature in English translation is taught as if it had been written in English. As a result, students submit what they read to their own cultural expectations; they do not read in translation and do not attend to the protocols of knowing, engagements and contestations that bind literature and society to each other. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation squarely addresses this pedagogical lack. Organised in a tripartite structure around considerations of textual, social, and large-scale spatial and historical circumstances, its thirty plus essays each deal with a theme of translation studies, as emerged from the translation of one or more Chinese literary works. In doing so, it offers new tools for reading and appreciating modern and contemporary Chinese literature in the global context of its translation, offering in-depth studies about eminent Chinese authors and their literary masterpieces in translation. The first of its kind, this book is essential reading for anyone studying or researching Chinese literature in translation.

This book explores the ways in which individuals construct and integrate self-positions in a transcultural context, by adopting a pluralist theoretical and methodological approach that includes both Western post-modern viewpoints and ancient Chinese philosophical ideas. The book starts with stories of two second-generation Chinese young people and their mothers' life experiences in the UK, which can be seen as an epitome of individuals living in the modern and complex environment of the time. Using social constructionist viewpoints, it then analyzes the overt interaction between the individual and outside environment and interprets the recessive interaction, such as the individual’s psychological response to the outside environment, which might be unknown to him or herself, using the psychodynamic approach based on object relations theory and other psychoanalytic concepts, such as defense mechanisms. The book uses Confucian philosophy to show how Chinese people think about the relation between other people and themselves and also integrates different and even opposing theories and viewpoints from Taoist philosophy. This creative book provides a theoretical and practical approach to explore the conception of “self” and the way in which individuals construct their self-positions in a complex context. Combining cutting-edge Western psycho-social viewpoints and ancient Chinese philosophy, it appeals to readers interested in “self,” psycho-social approaches, psychoanalytic viewpoints and Chinese philosophy.