A Study On The Presentation Of Cultural Items In Elementary Textbooks For TCFL

Since the 1980s, cultural factors in foreign language teaching have been gradually recognized under the influence of such disciplines as intercultural communication, linguistic culturology, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics and in the wake of an international"Cultural Fever". Then research on teaching Chinese culture to foreigners and relevant practice has made some progress.Foreign language and second language teaching aims primarily at cultivating learners'intercultural communicative competence, which requires them to gain a substantial understanding of relevant cultures so as to grasp any cultural discrepancies. However, research on teaching Chinese culture to foreigners is relatively weak.Recent years have witnessed a batch of culture textbooks and books on cultural knowledge that can serve as textbooks, but a lack of research on cultural factors of textbooks for TCFL. Moreover, most of the few research is theoretical discussion or qualitative statement of experience without scientific investigation and empirical research is even less. A vacancy remains for quantitative analysis of presentation of cultural items of textbooks, which bears directly on standardization of cultural teaching and formulation of a cultural syllabus.This paper attempts to bridge that gap. Adopting related theories from intercultural communication, culturology, education science, second language teaching, applied linguistics, etc, and using two popular elementary textbooks as samples, the author tries to analyze and evaluate their arrangement and sequencing of cultural items from lexical items that carry most social and cultural features, and from other forms of linguistic items such as speech function, grammar, phonology, Chinese characters, and discourse.The paper concludes that current textbooks, though conforms basically to principles of teaching Chinese culture to foreigners, can not recreate contemporary Chinese spirit due to time lag between compilation of textbooks and their publication as well as some outdated cultural items. In addition, the current thesis attempts, with qualitative analysis, to explore the considerations of a feasible presentation of A Cultural Syllabus at the Elementary Level for TCFL in the hope that it will shed some light on the official formulation of such a cultural syllabus.