Gaining Insight Into Culture Through a Chinese Classical Novel: The Story of the Stone

Abstract

This paper is to discuss if Chinese classical novels could help people who learn Chinese to build up knowledge of Chinese culture more comprehensively. The study aims at introducing Chinese culture to the intermediate language learners from Korea who endeavoured to read The Story of Stone as it plays a critical part in contemporary Chinese society, but they were not proficient enough to understand classical Chinese. To bed commensurate with their levels, the materials were rewritten by highly coherence readers to three articles. The course devised by ADDIE is an instructional design process to maintain the quality of teaching. This teaching purpose aimed at 5Cs, including enhancing learners’ ability of communication and comprehension of culture in target language. I used DRTA(Directing Reading Thinking Activities) in the course as it could aid learners to understand the text and took in the readings of target language. Nevertheless, it could encourage students to help each other in courses and reinforce their motivations. The thinking in the target language is also boosted as Whorf (1956) pointed out that thinking is entirely linguistic; therefore, the language we use affects our thinking and our view of world (Daniel, 1995). This design of courses included three topics: family, gender and religion; learners firstly understood the Chinese culture in this novel and drew a comparison with theirs. This study adopted both quality and quantity approaches, whilst the result showed learners were satisfied and agreed with our perspective that literature helped them to gain insight into culture.



Author Information
An-Chi Lin, National Academy for Educational Research, Taiwan

Paper Information
Conference: ECLL2018
Stream: Culture and Language

This paper is part of the ECLL2018 Conference Proceedings (View)
Full Paper
View / Download the full paper in a new tab/window


Comments & Feedback

Place a comment using your LinkedIn profile

Comments

Share on activity feed

Powered by WP LinkPress

Share this Research

Posted by James Alexander Gordon