A Survey Of Cross - Cultural Education In Chinese Teaching In Scottish Middle Schools

With the development of globalization, the world has undergone immense transformations. Intercultural interactions have become part of everyday life, intercultural conflicts have emerged, which has becoming vital issue related with the peace of the world. There are strong communicative, apprehensive and peace imperatives for gaining competency in intercultural interactions.The fields of intercultural studies and intercultural education have grown as a response to these imperatives.Thereupon, UNESCO began to advocate intercultural education in the whole world since the1970s. With the vigorous efforts of UNESCO, intercultural education developed rapidly, and has became a trend in Europe and America. UK has made fruitful efforts on arranging intercultural education in Europe and achieved results. Intercultural ecucation has become a very import educational idea in British schools and embedded in every curriculum subjects, especially in morden foreign languages.Mandarin as a kind of foreign language in Scotland, its teaching and learning is not only an importment way for practicing intercultural education, but also a kind of intercultural education which encourages understanding and respect between British and Chinese.The Scottish Government emphases the importance of practicing intercultural education in morden foreign languages (Mandarin included), and has published a series of policy documents. And while working in Scotland I found intercultural education has become an importment theme of Mandarin teaching in Scottish secondary schools.Given this, the author decided to do a dissertation on it. This dissertation is divided into five parts:The first part is the introduction. Displays the origin and the significance of research on intercultural education on Mandarin teaching in Scottish secondary schools, the literature on intercultural education, and Mandarin teaching in Scottish secondary schools, so as to establish the necessity of the research.The second part examines the definition of intercultural education and some other concept concerned, displays the basic theories of this research. And on this basis, the author tries to analysis the Scottish language policies in order to conclude course standards on the intercultural objectives, contents, and methodology in Mandarin teaching.The third part, based on the second part, designs the questionnaires and the interview guides, Connecting them with real class observation, examines the practice of intercultural education in Mandarin teaching in Scottish secondary schools.The fourth part, based on the third part of the survey results and points out the existing problems, and gives the improvement suggestions.The fifth part is a conclusion. Summarize the features of intercultural education in Mandarin teaching practice in Scottish secondary schools and points out the implications for Chinese teachers.