Enhancing Cross-cultural Competence of Advanced Chinese Learners — Strategies in Teaching Business Chinese at the College Level

Integrating cross-cultural education into language instruction has been a considerable challenge for second language educators, becoming even more challenging when teaching languages for specific purposes, such as business, which faces significantly increased global competition. This paper presents a few pedagogical strategies I utilized to implement cultural components in advanced business Chinese instruction with the purpose of enhance students’ cross-cultural competence. The first part focuses on strategies of selecting appropriate teaching materials to create a dynamic context for cross-cultural language learning. While adopting Yuan Fangyuan’s Business Chinese for Success: Real Cases from Real Companies as the textbook, I have integrated a variety of relevant supplemental materials from newspapers such as Wall Street Journal and from multimedia such as clips from TV. The diversity of the integrated materials not only allow students to acquire an enriched Chinese business vocabulary, conventional phrases and expressions unique to Chinese business settings, but also increase students’ cross-cultural awareness and knowledge, keep them abreast with recent highlights in the Chinese and global business markets, and motivate them to further explore the selected topics. The second part of the paper presents three examples of teaching intercultural managements cases (KFC, Starbucks Coffee, and IKEA), illustrating various ways of approaching course materials from a cross-cultural perspective, such as designing class discussion topics and assigning business writing, translation, and presentation. The paper will demonstrate that effective strategies with cross-cultural intention can equip students not only linguistically, but also culturally, to function more comfortably and confidently in Chinese business environment