Teach Chinese from cultural roots to local school culture : developing the Chinese teacher's and Australian students' intercultural competence

This thesis furthers our understanding of the relationship between language and culture in general and of the implication for teaching Chinese as a foreign language in particular. In the field of language teaching, there are numerous metaphors to illustrate the relationship between culture and language. One metaphor is that communication is like transportation; language is the vehicle and culture is the traffic light. Language makes communication easier and faster; culture regulates, sometimes promotes and sometimes hinders communication. In this action research, the teacher-researcher discovered that to develop Australian high school students’ intercultural competence requires the teacher to acquire the target culture at a high level. The teacher-researcher has to both learn from her home cultural root, and learn through the adaption of the Australian school culture. During the teaching-research process, a graffiti-style Chinese character booklet was designed for the students. The Chinese characters were originally developed from pictographs, so they are more like pictures to Australian students. Further, it seems that for some students in Australian high schools with difficulty in reading literacy, the graffiti booklet provides confidence in learning a foreign language. This thesis argues that learning cultural knowledge is about knowing how to engage with the culture and the research was devised to demonstrate that this is the case. Deardorff’s intercultural competence model was used as framework for this study. In accordance with the model, the study shows that the teacher-researcher has developed the ability to produce and create the teaching resources that suit Australian high school students, and demonstrates that she has developed a higher level of intercultural competence through the teaching-research process