Integrating Culture Into Chinese Classrooms Of American Public Schools

This paper discusses the importance of integrating cultural elements into the high school classroom in the U.S., and proposes the appropriate teaching approaches and methods of incorporating the culture with the teaching content materials into the CSL (Chinese as Second Language Learning) classroom. The main objective of the paper is to provide the appropriate teaching methods and recommend some good teaching resources for Chinese language teaching. I will take the students in the CSL classes in the American K-12 public school system as the target group for this study. Furthermore, Fishman's work about the three links between language and culture, Clair Kramsch's work about the language in relation with culture, as well as other scholarly works will be referenced when explaining why the CSL teachers need to integrate the culture into their lessons, because these theories all focus on the inseparability of language and culture. After reading the works of Hadley, the comparison teaching method will be indicated in this paper for incorporating the culture into CSL classes. Finally, this study illustrates that the cultural elements are a good teaching aid for increasing the students'awareness of the cultural connotations of words and phrases in Chinese language, and improves that comparison teaching method definitely could be an effective way to integrate culture into Chinese classrooms in American public schools.