A Study On The Introduction Of Chinese Classroom Culture In Primary And Middle Schools In New Zealand

Cultural input plays a very important role in teaching Chinese as a second language. We believe that, to have an effective cultural input, we should obey the principles of hierarchy, suitability, practicability, comparison, and interest. The contents of cultural input mainly include eight categories, such as the culture of geography, system, custom, history, arts, thought, language&characters and mentality. The methods of cultural input may include supplementary explanation, integrated method, experience method, comparative method, theme lecture, and osmosis method. We can have cultural input during language teaching classes, cultural theme classes, or we could organize cultural events, have students discuss the results after their surveys, or show the students some Chinese movies. We may take cooperative instruction as the model of cultural input.Basing on our research and interview, we are going to find out the cultural input situation in New Zealand primary and middle schools. Primary schools attach great importance to the principle of interest, while middle schools relatively attach great importance to the principles of practicality and comparison. Both primary schools and middle schools focus on customs cultural input, but lack of mentality cultural input. Teachers prefer to take cultural input as supplements of language teaching. The advantages of cooperative instruction model in cultural input in New Zealand primary and middle schools mainly include:adopt the form of group discussion actively, group size is reasonable, teachers’ evaluation and feedback are comprehensive and specific. There are some problems at the same time, such as:grouping is easy to become a mere formality, the division of labor in a group is not clear, teachers’ abilities of class control need to be improved, the lack of cooperation between teachers and unreasonable utilization of teaching resources, etc.We also give some advice on cultural input. We should not only insist the principle of interest, but also pay more attention to the principles of suitability and hierarchy. We could improve the objectivity and systematicness of the contents of cultural input by collective lesson preparation, and we need to strengthen the teaching of Chinese characters and mentality culture at the same time. We could try to combine different methods of cultural input to improve the positivity and enthusiasm of the students. We may get support from the Confucius institute, schools and parents to make cultural activities successful. It needs to be more scientifical to divide students into groups, and there need to be a very clear division of labor in the group. What’s more, teachers need to improve their abilities of class control, and strengthen cooperation and communication between teachers. We also need to make full use of different kinds of teaching resources. In that way, we could get better effect in cultural input and international promotion of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language(TCFL).