Chinese Education Research

Chinese Language and Culture Education has a long history but is also quite young as a discipline. So far there have been few specialized systematic studies conducted in this field. Based on the survey of the history and the status quo of Chinese Language and Culture Education, the author discusses in this dissertation the nature and characteristics of Chinese Language and Culture Education as a discipline and proposes his personal viewpoint as to the curriculum project and reform of the teaching methodology.Chapter One enumerates the essential modes and the types of teaching organizations in the educational system of Chinese language and culture. Based on the investigation of the history and the status quo of Chinese Language and Culture Education, for the time, the author proposes that Chinese Language and Culture Education being implemented all over the world, is a teaching system which is enormous in dimensions, closely related in organization, abundant in structure and distinctive in characteristics.Chapter Two probes into the intercomparisons between Chinese Language and Culture Education, Traditional Chinese Language Teaching and Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages and illuminates the nature and characteristics of Chinese language andculture education as well as its social functions and significances: the objectives of Chinese Language and Culture Education being the inheritance and transmission of the language and culture of the Chinese nation and the cultivation of citizens in each country with the specific temperament of Chinese culture and civilization.Chapter Three, by elucidating the essentials in Chinese Language and Culture Education, points out the educational objectives, cultivation objectives and teaching objectives in contemporary Chinese Language and Culture Education. In order to achieve the objectives of the discipline of Chinese Language and Culture Education, the author of this dissertation argues that the homogeneous curriculum project of Chinese language be changed and a system of language and culture curriculum be constructed in Chinese Language and Culture Education. Chapter Four makes an analysis of the characteristics of Chinese language teaching and is focused on the discussion of the two problems concerning the framework structure and "Sentence-oriented Teaching" in Chinese language teaching: the language teaching of contemporary Chinese Language and Culture Education is the teaching of the national mother tongue as a second language, the basic task of which being the cultivation of the communicative competence of national descendants of using their national mother tongue and help them nurture their quality of national mother tongue. The language-teachingframework which meets the requirements of overseas Chinese students learning the Chinese language is the one that combines "structure and function" and "syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationship". It is the syntactic structural characteristics of the Chinese language that determine the superiority and necessity of sentence teaching.Chapter Five expounds the significance of the culture curriculum construction, with emphasis on the discussion of the characteristics of the culture curriculum construction. The ultimate aim of Chinese Language and Culture Education consists in cultivating the national temperament in hyphenated students of Chinese origin, moulding and remoulding them with a civilized personality of Chinese culture. The culture curriculum is of an overt structure, meanwhile, the teaching procedure of which being the progress of cultural practice and acquisition.