Culture and Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) Teaching Materials: An Introduction

Abstract

Against the background of the multilingual and multicultural turn in today’s increasingly globalized world, there has been mounting scholarly interest in issues on culture and language teaching textbooks or materials in general. This introductory text first maps out some main themes and issues in the field with an emphasis on the context of Chinese as a second language (CSL) education. Key topics and issues deserving serious academic scrutiny include problematic representations of cultural groups, cultural perspectives, and cultural practices; besides, from a multicultural and citizenship education point of view, global issues such as shallow environmentalism, gender inequality, and rampant discourses of neoliberalism have also drawn attention from researchers in the field. We then give a summary of the four chapters in this Special Issue and conclude with some conceptual and methodological recommendations for future research.

Keywords

• culture
• chinese as a second language (csl)
• multilingualism
• multiculturalism
• representation
• textbooks