Fostering Intercultural Awareness in a Chinese English Reading Class
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Qun Yu
Qun Yu is Associate Professor in the English Department of Jinling College, Nanjing University. Her current research interests include English reading and writing, intercultural communication and ethnic dialogues.
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Jan Van Maele
Jan Van Maele, PhD, is Professor at the Faculty of Engineering Technology (Campus Group T) at KU Leuven, Belgium. His main research interests are intercultural communication, international education and language assessment.
Abstract
Since the turn of the century, higher education policy in China has highlighted the importance of cultivating students’ intercultural competences, particularly in the context of English language teaching. In spite of this, studies show that to this day Chinese ELT classrooms in higher education have rarely taken a cultural turn and teachers’ understanding of interculturalism remains insufficient. This paper reports an action research study on how intercultural awareness was developed in the context of an English reading course at an independent college of a major Chinese university. The study followed a teaching flow that integrates intercultural learning with critical thinking by challenging students to select, analyze, and raise questions about English texts on aspects of Chinese culture. Mapping the outputs of a cohort of 77 second-year undergraduate students onto Baker’s (2012; 2015) model of intercultural awareness, the study shows that a majority of participants demonstrated a level beyond basic awareness. The paper concludes that reading courses can be used to help foster intercultural awareness among Chinese students, and it offers some pedagogical and theoretical reflections on integrating intercultural learning with ELT, and formulates a number of suggestions for further studies.
About the authors
Qun Yu is Associate Professor in the English Department of Jinling College, Nanjing University. Her current research interests include English reading and writing, intercultural communication and ethnic dialogues.
Jan Van Maele, PhD, is Professor at the Faculty of Engineering Technology (Campus Group T) at KU Leuven, Belgium. His main research interests are intercultural communication, international education and language assessment.
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors of Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics for their very helpful suggestions for the revision of this paper.
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© 2018 FLTRP, Walter de Gruyter, Cultural and Education Section British Embassy
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Chinese as a Second Language Learning and Teaching
- Introduction to Special Column “Chinese as a Second Language Learning and Teaching”
- Teachers’ Beliefs and Practices of Task-Based Language Teaching in Chinese as a Second Language Classrooms
- A Case Study on Intermediate CSL Learners’ Word Recognition Processes and Strategies in Contextual Reading Settings
- A Case Study on Elementary CSL Learners’ Reading Anxiety
- Second Language Writing
- Resolving the Terminological Mishmash in Teaching Link Words in EFL Writing
- Cross-Cultural Communications & Language Teaching
- Oral English Skills of Chinese University Students in Describing Their Native Culture
- Fostering Intercultural Awareness in a Chinese English Reading Class
- Second Language Acquisition
- Three Elements That Affect the Realisation of Subject-Verb Agreement in the Speech Production of L2 Speakers of English with L1 Chinese
- Second Language Acquisition
- Chinese Abstracts
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Chinese as a Second Language Learning and Teaching
- Introduction to Special Column “Chinese as a Second Language Learning and Teaching”
- Teachers’ Beliefs and Practices of Task-Based Language Teaching in Chinese as a Second Language Classrooms
- A Case Study on Intermediate CSL Learners’ Word Recognition Processes and Strategies in Contextual Reading Settings
- A Case Study on Elementary CSL Learners’ Reading Anxiety
- Second Language Writing
- Resolving the Terminological Mishmash in Teaching Link Words in EFL Writing
- Cross-Cultural Communications & Language Teaching
- Oral English Skills of Chinese University Students in Describing Their Native Culture
- Fostering Intercultural Awareness in a Chinese English Reading Class
- Second Language Acquisition
- Three Elements That Affect the Realisation of Subject-Verb Agreement in the Speech Production of L2 Speakers of English with L1 Chinese
- Second Language Acquisition
- Chinese Abstracts
