Scott Smith 
Teacher Voices in Chinese Language Teaching 
Personal Reflections on Culture

This book reports the results of an ethnographic study, focusing primarily on the experiences of four teachers of the Chinese language in Australian secondary schools. The author creates an audience for their voices as they reflect on their own understandings of culture, language teaching, and culture in language teaching through semi-structured interviews, and compares these reflections with written stimulus dialogues designed to elicit ‘culture-in-language’ reflections, as well as curriculum and policy documents produced by the Australian government. The book’s findings indicate that teachers of the Chinese language are diverse in their views on culture, language teaching, and the ways in which culture can or should inform language teaching, and the author argues that language teacher intercultural competence cannot be assessed through a synthesis of the current English-only research literature. This book will be of interest to teachers and teacher trainers of Chinese as a foreign language, as well as students and scholars of applied linguistics and language education more broadly.

Table of Content

1 Who is Teaching Who What? Chinese as a Foreign Language Teaching in Australian Schools.- 2 Intercultural Competence as a Goal of Language Learning: What Are Chinese Teachers Doing with Culture?.- 3 A Way to Discover Culture in Language.- 4 Teacher Voices on Thoughts About Language and Culture Teaching.- 5 The Way Forward.- Appendix A: Online Survey for CFL Teachers.- Appendix B: Interview Questions (Part A).

About the author

Scott Smith is the Dean of Education at Morling College. He spent an extended period in China where he learned Mandarin and taught English.