The Design Of Guqin Culture Curriculum For Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language

On one hand, guqin is classified as the first of the four arts-guqin, chess, calligraphy and painting, which is a must for an educated man in ancient times. Out of question, guqin is not only an antique Chinese traditional musical instrument, but also a Chinese "fingertip" culture. On the other hand, with the increasing number of students and the much higher and higher level of these people’s Chinese learning, spreading Chinese culture turns to be an important mission in teaching Chinese as a foreign language (TCFL). Nowadays, the current TCFL has become more complete and has opened some cultural systematic curricula such as Chinese calligraphy, paper cutting, dancing, tai chi, etc.Based on the above issues, Shanghai Foreign Language School Affiliated to SISU (Shanghai International Studies University) attempts to open guqin culture classes, aiming to the dual practice of guqin playing and cultural knowledge learning, so that it can help the international students achieve different cultural experience, stimulate their interests in learning Chinese and broaden their horizons.However, now there isn’t a complete guqin curriculum for reference. Thereby Shanghai Foreign Language School Affiliated to SISU decides to design and develope a complete guqin culture curriculum including related materials with the support of the teachers in Shanghai Conservatory of Music. I feel great honored to participate in this entire process.The whole design of guqin culture curriculum contains four aspects:the overall design, materials preparation, class teaching plan and evaluation. This paper first made an overview of the curriculum design, including curriculum description, teaching object, curriculum resources, teaching objectives, teaching principles and innovative features. Then we discussed the preparation of textbook and related teaching materials, which comprised needs analysis, textbook structure, content selection, writing style, hours setting, usage advice and other supporting materials. Further we demonstrated the required preparation, process and keystone of the class by detailed teaching plan models. Finally we tested the whole curriculum design and analyzed the specific problems through the students’ responses and the live classes that started in the first semester of2013.While describing, analyzing and summarizing the curriculum design, this research has been an endeavor to explore an effective way to spread Chinese culture and make a variety of possibilities, hoping that there are more and more emerging culture courses of different types and levels to enrich the vast majority of people Chinese language learning.