What do you know about Chinese culture?
- By staff reporter Zhang Hui
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E-mail China Today, June 20, 2017
Towards a Better Understanding of China
In order to help American teenagers find out more about China, Dr. Liu is concentrating his efforts on bringing Chinese culture to college campuses and communities. In his capacity as researcher with the National Resource Center for Asian Languages (NRCAL) he also offers support to Chinese cultural education across the country.
Film is one of the most important vehicles for learning about other cultures, but due to the relatively small number of Chinese films shown in the U.S., American students hardly ever get to see them. So, to help American students explore Chinese film, Dr. Liu decided to bring them into the classroom. Chinese films often did not fare well when exposed to the criticisms of American students, but they presented perspectives on contemporary China and enhanced students' overall understanding of the country.
Dr. Liu introduced an art history class at the school. Whenever a Chinese festival rolls around he and his students organize all sorts of events on the city campus, with a booth of experts who give talks on cultural traditions. And, of course, there is the obligatory lion dance at Spring Festival, which is always a hit with Americans. Dr. Liu and his team have also brought Chinese cultural events into local communities. They organized an exhibition of paintings by Zhang Daqian and Zhang Shanzi, to give people in the local community the chance to appreciate China's art masters.
As part of his work with the NRCAL, Dr. Liu is responsible for developing training for teachers of Chinese in American schools, offering support and addressing any problems they have with classes on Chinese culture. Dr. Liu discovered that a lot of teachers found it a huge problem that language and culture are usually taught separately. Many students assumed that if they didn't know much Chinese language they would find it very difficult to study Chinese culture. Consequently some students even dropped out of the course. Dr. Liu believes the teaching materials were much to blame.
The U.S. Department of Education is currently looking into implementing bilingual education programs in some kindergartens and primary schools, but they are faced with a shortage of teaching materials and resources. Dr. Liu recommends teaching materials which are best suited to the learning needs of American teenagers, with the objective of helping them learn more about Chinese language and culture. He has raised several issues with publishers of Chinese language teaching materials and Chinese language reading materials which need to be addressed if Chinese is to be appropriately taught abroad.
Firstly, the target age of the reader needs to be identified, then specific materials created for that age group. For example, for children aged six to eight, the basic unit of reading is a sentence, not long passages. When writing books for children of this age, the author must have an in-depth understanding of their cognitive development and level of knowledge, and use familiar language to create the story. Dr. Liu said that there were plenty of books on the market aimed at six to eight-year-olds, but most of the content was completely unsuitable as it featured words and sentences that young children could not understand. That explains why Chinese books had problems breaking into the American market, because the content was just too difficult, he added.
Dr. Liu suggested that there should be more biographies written for children, like those about internationally recognized Chinese celebrities, focusing on their youth and adolescence.
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