Research On The Development Status Of Traditional Archery In Universities In The Pearl River Delta

As a Chinese national traditional sports culture,traditional archery has a long history and has been handed down to the present day.It contains Chinese characteristics and unique philosophical ideas and is originated from the primitive society and made a legend in the era of cold weapon.Whereas the archery had been dwindling around firearm era,it has almost gone in modern time with coming of modern western sports culture.Nowadays,under the background of cultural self-confidence advocated by government,traditional Chinese culture becomes renascent.While traditional archery,as an excellent Chinese sports culture,with a long period of rise,development and decline,finally comes to path to recovery.In order to clarify the status of schools where traditional archery is taught,and to explore problems and experiences,as well to provide a theoretical basis for traditional archery and further study.This thesis selects some general universities where traditional archery activities are well developed of the Pearl River Delta area as example for researches.The thesis,by using literature data,questionnaire survey,expert interview,field survey and applying mathematical statistics,works on the current situation of traditional archery in six different universities SCNU,JNU,GUOF,SZPT,UIC,BNUZ of the Pearl River Delta area.The thesis pays attention to the form of organization,the current status of archery courses,the teaching content,training status,the improvement of archery clubs,archery equipment,and as well the competitions.It aims to identify the current issues of the archery movement and provide some targeted countermeasures.The results show that firstly the basic status of the universities can be introduced from five aspects.First of all,patterns of these universities are mainly common lessons,student organizations and sport teams.Each organization would have a dedicated and responsible teacher.Some of them also set up a professional team.Secondly,the universities conduct the archery courses basically as public and common courses.The courses run for 17 weeks per semester,once a week for90 mins,and the elective classes are normally 2 to 5 classes around 40 students each.Thirdly,though most students are lack with the knowledge of traditional archery,they show great interests of this sport.However,many students are not be able to take the classes due to the limited number of teachers and courses.Fourthly,it is found from the teaching plans that archery courses are highly arbitrary in the content and organization.The plan is simple with teaching content and technical objectives but without the core qualities of the physical education discipline.Some of the universities focus only on the mastery of skills,but other of them include the archery etiquette as well.Most importantly,there is no basis for academic quality standard for archery,which leads to various student assessments and greatly random in study assessment criteria.It shows that the immaturity in the pedagogical grinding of courses.However,students who take part in the archery courses are commonly satisfied with the courses and the effectiveness of the teaching are recognized by them.They are generally satisfied with the lesson time,content teaching and assessment methods.Fifthly,the organizations begin to take in shape with average of around 50 members,regular training time and the ability to participate in competitions.The daily exercises are responsible for school and advanced students,supported by the universities and students’ fees.The main reasons limiting the development of traditional archery are as follows;the school leaders are reluctant to the courses due to safety concerns;equipment is difficult to lacks standardization and criteria;the lack of teaching materials for the courses has led to the short of clarity about students how to learn and master this sport;the course is taught in a single format and cannot meet the needs of a wider range of students;few competitions lead to a lack of enthusiasm for training and stagnation of students’ skills;weak teaching staff resulting in a low number of courses offered and students training,etc.From the above questions,the thesis puts forward some reference suggestions.First of all,the government has to increase support for outstanding traditional sports.Secondly,promote the concept of reviving traditional archery in its diversity and integration.Thirdly,building an official traditional archery assessment system.Fourthly,promote the traditional archery to junior and senior schools.The countermeasures are as followed.First is to optimize the curriculum.Second is to enrich various forms of teaching and learning and make a linkage between student associations and elective courses and even future specialized courses to enlarge the integration of formal and informal courses.Next is to strengthen the construction of teaching materials and form traditional archery teaching content for university students.Fourth is to raise funds from multiple ways to make a good use of the standardization of traditional archery facilities and the allocation of equipment.Fifth is to hold more competitions at all levels to promote practice,enhance inter-school exchanges and promote students’ interest in learning.The last is to promote the faculty and high-level teachers and deepen the further upgrading of existing teachers and focus on the various teacher training.