A Study On Cultural Knowledge Contained In Elementary-level Chinese Teaching Textbooks In Italy

The Chinese teaching textbooks for minority-language-spoken country are scarce, and multi-edition textbooks can not become acclimatized to oversea markets very well, thus the compilation of nationalized textbooks become the preoccupation of the international promotion of Chinese teaching.In order to clarify the target of Chinese textbooks for Italian and how to make the textbooks become practical, we selected two elementary-level textbooks——Cinese Contemporaneo and Il Cinese per Gli Italiani as samples, and made a investigation of cultural knowledge contained in the textbooks from three aspects: the cultural point, local words, characters and their activities.Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, we have the following three findings.From the cultural aspect: Cinese Contemporaneo contain too many complicated cultural points, most of them are one-way output and pure Chinese cultural knowledge; while Il Cinese per Gli Italiani contain more communicative and concise cultural points.From the local words aspect: Il Cinese per Gli Italiani contain more local words than Cinese Contemporaneo, and there are some English-version residues in Cinese Contemporaneo.From the characters and activities aspect: the characters in Cinese Contemporaneo are complicated and mainly Chinese, and the text plots are abrupt and incoherent; while the Il Cinese per Gli Italiani contain more Italian and European charaters, also the text plots are more coherent and close to the real communication.On the whole, the compilation of Il Cinese per Gli Italiani is much better than Cinese Contemporaneo.