Performed culture: an approach to East Asian language pedagogy

摘要

With the increasing interest in East Asian languages (EAL) and cultures in North America over the past few decades, enrollments in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean language courses at colleges and universities have also increased. This increase calls for qualified and effective teachers who can effectively instruct EAL learners. To meet this need, the book Performed culture provides an innovative approach in the field of East Asian language pedagogy, which heavily relies on Western European language and ESL pedagogies. The authors strongly believe that the pedagogy for teaching East Asian language to native English speakers should be different from the one for teaching Indo-European languages to native speakers of those languages. Thus, they introduce a new method, 'a performed culture approach', for EAL teaching when there is a large distance, both linguistically and culturally, between native language and the target language. This new approach 'has a strong cultural component with an emphasis on the performative aspect of language learning' (p.7). In other words, this book recommends an emphasis on the cultural context in which EAL teaching and learning inevitably take place.