A Study Of Cultural Items In Taiwan’s Chinese Textbooks

With the increasing number of Chinese learners,compiling a set of Chinese textbooks that can adapt to different language environments and have national characteristics has become an important direction for the new generation of Chinese speakers to write Chinese textbooks.Nowadays,although many excellent textbooks’ editors have gradually realized the importance of the selection and arrangement of cultural contents in textbooks,there are still problems of inappropriate selection of cultural items and shifted focus of cultural teaching in the compilation of textbooks.Taiwan has always played a crucial role in the field of teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages.In recent years,many excellent Chinese textbooks have been published locally in Taiwan and have successfully become the common Chinese textbooks in Taiwan.Therefore,this paper turns the focus of the study to Chinese textbooks to seek the pattern of cultural items in the arrangement of Chinese textbooks in Taiwan,so as to understand the pedagogical focus of culture in textbooks,in order to provide ideas for the future development of Chinese textbooks.This paper selects Chinese textbook Far East Everyday Chinese,which was published around the turn of the millennium and is still in use today and attempts to analyze its cultural item arrangement pattern.The full text can be divided into six chapters.The first chapter explains the reasons for the selection of the topic,the significance of the topic,and the status of domestic and international research on cultural projects in the field of TCFL.The second chapter introduces the background of the textbook,the editor’s description,and the specific layout of the textbook,providing a concrete basis for the analysis of the cultural items in the textbook and the author’s personal feelings.The third chapter presents the cultural items’ classification table for the Far East Everyday Chinese based on the "New Cultural Item List" and Lu Wei’s "Outline".On this basis,a quantitative statistical analysis of the text content is conducted.By sorting out the contents of Far East Everyday Chinese,we found that there is a certain pattern in the number of cultural items covered,the number of topics of "daily life and customs" is larger than that of "communicative activities","idelogy",“national conditions” and“culture of achievement”.The fourth chapter analyzes the cultural items involved in textbooks from five dimensions: national conditions,culture of achievement,daily life and customs,communicative activities and ideology.Secondly,summarize the characteristics of local culture or lifestyle of Taiwan people in each dimension.The fifth chapter analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of the Far East Everyday Chinese in the arrangement of cultural items,concluding that Far East Everyday Chinese has the advantages of being relevant,authentic,forward-looking,contemporary,identity-oriented,and practical,as well as the shortcomings of being outdated and narrow-minded.Morever,suggestions are made for Chinese textbooks in the light of the current situation in the international Chinese language education field:firstly,authentic corpus should be selected;secondly,practicality should be improved;thirdly,inclusiveness should be enhanced;finally,articulation should be focused on.The sixth chapter aims to conclude the paper,which summarizes the full text,states the shortcomings of the paper,and finally makes an outlook on the future development of Far Eat Everyday Chinese.