National And Cultural Value Representation In Chinese Language Textbooks

Abstract

Values are the regulatory components inherent in any culture. Values are formed only in culture and are certain regulators of human activity. In the process of learning foreign languages, special attention is paid to the national-cultural component. The authors of the article have shown that the purpose of intercultural education is to preserve linguistic and cultural diversity in society and to prepare the subjects of the educational process for a successful dialogue of cultures that can neutralize linguistic and cultural differences for productive intercultural interaction. The basis of active interaction is the dialogue of cultures, and teaching a foreign language focuses primarily on solving pragmatic problems, including the formation of intercultural competence, and on the other hand, in the context of intercultural education, the subject’s need to form a value attitude towards a person, the subjects of new cultures and the world as a whole must be satisfied. The article is devoted to the problem of the content of modern foreign language textbooks. Considering the textbook as a model, the authors dwelt on the content of the Chinese language textbook from the perspective of the national and cultural values transmitted by it. At the same time, the authors consider the raised issue from the anthropocentric concept of modern foreign language education and propose the idea to rely on the basic individual’s culture while choosing the textbook content, which allows a person to live in harmony with both the universal and national cultures, as well as with other peoples’ cultures.

Keywords: Axiological approach, chinese language textbook, intercultural interaction, national and cultural values, values

Introduction

In recent years, there has been a clear change in the vector of the ideology in modern language education. At the beginning of the XXI century, "under the influence of a mass of unpredictable, bifurcating, complex interacting factors, this system is rapidly evolving, responding to changes in the surrounding space" (Tareva, 2015, p. 75). In particular, there has been a shift towards the dialogue of cultures. In the process of dialogical communication, the importance of communication in a foreign language is increasing significantly (Vikulova et al., 2017). According to the observations of modern psychologists and methodologists, nowadays mastering "communication through a foreign language as a living and real means of interpersonal interaction" (Mazunova & Rizayeva, 2013, p. 2) has become pragmatically necessary.

In this regard, a foreign language textbook is of particular importance, which is considered as a tool of "political influence on the younger generation and the preservation of national and cultural identity" (Shchepilova, 2017, p. 213). The factor of the teacher's correct speech in a foreign language classroom also plays an important role, both from the point of view of lexical and grammatical skills, and the political correctness of the utterance. Linguists and specialists in the field of linguodidactics pay attention to this issue, considering the problem of speech evaluation and the problem of values functioning in pedagogical discourse.

Problem Statement

In the context of increased integration and development of international relations, expansion of migration processes, humanistic values come to the fore, including respect for the cultural characteristics of a person and the willingness of the subject to conduct a dialogue of cultures. In science, the category of "value" is fundamental in defining universal concepts. Values regulate and specify human behaviour, filling it with certain meanings and goals. Values play an important role in the formation of a personality since they determine his cultural identity, mentality, and ways of behaviour. Petrauskaite and Markeliene (2018), Wu et al. (2017), Chowdhury et al. (2020) studied values and their impact on a person. The authors considered the role of values in various spheres of life.

When solving problems from the perspective of the axiological approach, domestic researchers highlight the socio-cultural basis underlying the definition of the nature of values and determining human behaviour in society. The personality is always guided by the set of attitudes that were formed under the influence of society, culture, family, and which, in the course of interaction with other people help a person to realize his subjectivity. In this regard, such concepts as "socio-cultural values", "national values", "cultural values" and others are actively used in science, highlighting one or another component depending on the inclusion of the individual in the social, cultural, or personal space. Thus, Korolyov (2021) considers national value as a component of linguistic consciousness, and value dominants are studied from a cognitive-semiotic position in terms of their relationship with the concepts of communicative value and linguistic and cultural code.

An important means of successfully mastering the values of the foreign socio-cultural environment is a language that accumulates the cultural and historical development of a society and reflects the mentality of a particular culture. Various value meanings are actualized in the language, represented in axiological concepts, the analysis of which allows studying the cultural values reflected in the language and thereby get a picture of the axiological preferences of a particular linguistic culture (Salnikova, 2010).

Many practising teachers emphasized the need to learn a foreign language in the context of a foreign language culture (Dordevic, 2017). For example, Ter-Minasova (2017) analysed the issues of intercultural communication, in particular, the problems of linguistic and cultural barriers hampering effective intercultural communication and causing linguistic and cultural difficulties.

However, scientists often express their opinion about the inclusion of foreign languages into education as a tool that allows spreading the ideologies of certain societies, transmitting the cultural values of their country to another society (Tareva, 2015). Questions about the balance between the knowledge of native and target cultures, about the danger of loss of national and cultural identity are on the current agenda in the political and educational fields of many countries.

Research Questions

The authors of the article place a great emphasis on national and cultural values. Values are regulatory components inherent in any culture that embody ideals and ideas about the norms and patterns of behaviour. They represent an altered form of consciousness that allows the subject to fix objective essential characteristics and reproduce them while identifying a personality with a cultural group. Each cultural group has different hierarchies of values, which are constantly changing in the course of historical development and which determine the way a person socializes.

Swoboda and Batton (2019) pointed out that national culture is strongly attributed to individual CR (corporate reputation) perceptions of MNCs (multinational corporations) across nations. Values are organized into systems by people living in one culture based on accepted social rules that determine an individual’s behaviour in a particular culture with reproducible modes of behaviour daily. These customs and routines reflect behavioural models. Representatives of different cultures may have the same or similar values, but they embody them in absolutely different customs and vice versa. A custom depends on both a system of values and a model of behaviour. These components are universal for any culture, but they are realized differently in each specific culture having a variable content (Guruleva, 2019).

National and cultural values reflect national identity, customs, and traditions. They include this nation's interests, needs, and beliefs. Such components as spiritual, moral, and aesthetic ideals should become the core element of the concepts of "national values" and "cultural values" (Dvurechenskaya & Yakovleva, 2017; Swoboda & Batton, 2019).

Summing it up, every culture analyses all objects, concepts, and ideas that help people form a specific attitude towards them. As a result, an excepted value attitude to the world appears. People give meaning to various concepts and phenomena of the external world. Hence, value is not a thing but a person's attitude to each process or a phenomenon. But every society has basic concepts, the semantic content of which differs in each culture. It is crucial to learn socially acceptable values, conventional norms, and behaviours for productive intercultural interaction. The question is that how to apply the value of the national character in learning (Mr Hendra & Kusasi, 2017).

Purpose of the Study

The main goal of intercultural education is to preserve linguistic and cultural diversity in society and to prepare the subjects of the educational process for a successful dialogue of cultures. It can neutralize linguistic and cultural differences for productive intercultural interaction. The national-cultural component plays a crucial role in the process of learning foreign languages. The purpose of this paper is to analyse Chinese language textbooks of domestic and foreign publishers for the content of the national-cultural component.

Research Methods

The solution to the above-noted problem is made in line with the axiological approach, taking into account the personality-oriented paradigm. The choice of textbooks should use a strategy that allows implementing the intercultural dialogue. This strategy should rely on a method of textbook comparison to identify their cross-culturally oriented potential (Tareva & Pavlova, 2020).

Findings

Learning foreign languages subjects are engaged in situations of intercultural interaction. Intercultural interaction, being a side of social interaction, is in a way an organized system of mutual acts of social activity, including statuses, socio-cultural roles, socio-cultural relationships, symbols, and meanings (Blinov & Nedorezova, 2009). Intercultural interaction presupposes knowledge of the socio-cultural basis and the development of social contacts in a new society.

While entering a new culture, it is necessary to establish good relationships at the level of "I-you" and "we – you." And for this, it is essential to know a set of conventional norms and rules of behaviour, accepted values, customs and traditions, socio-cultural roles, relationships, symbols, and meanings. It is crucial to update the existing socio-cultural knowledge at the interpersonal level and be able to choose the values available to the subject that contribute to adaptation in a new culture, as well as be able to show a person’s communicative competencies, empathy, and tolerance (Grebennikova, 2016). Mastering intercultural competence is impossible without the perception of a "foreign" view of oneself since sensitization to the peculiarities of native culture is the most significant step on the way to intercultural competence (Berdichevsky, 2012).

People’s cultural characteristics become obvious while interacting with representatives of other cultures, and communicants acquire new socio-cultural knowledge about the values of an interacting society exclusively through the prism of their culture, analysing and comparing realities, language, traditions, and values.

In its turn, updating the goals and content of language education nowadays in line with the personality-oriented paradigm involves the insertion of a national-regional component in foreign language teaching. The importance of this component is underlined because the understanding of another culture is possible only with good knowledge of a person’s own culture. It should be noted that a well-established approach in teaching practice has become popular when a foreign language is considered mainly as a means of introducing the culture of the target language. As a result, students have difficulty communicating information in a foreign language about facts and phenomena related to their native/regional culture (Sorokovykh, 2004).

As it was emphasized above, a foreign language is an integral component of culture, its accumulator, carrier, and a means to express thoughts and feelings. Therefore, the predominant way of language acquisition can be reflected in the formula proposed by E.I. Passov: culture should be acquired through language and language through culture. It means that the assimilation of cultural facts is realized in the process of using language as a means of communication, and language acquisition as a means of communication is based on the assimilation of cultural facts. This interaction with the cultural issues implies communication on their basis in the dialogue of cultures, which means that target and source cultures interact. Experience shows that intercultural communication needs special training through the use of intercultural textbooks that make it possible to overcome the prevailing stereotypes. Even staying in the country of the target language does not solve this problem (as cited in Berdichevsky, 2012).

In recent years, owing to the constant strengthening of friendly relations between Russia and China, the number of Chinese language learners has been steadily growing; the scale of Chinese language teaching is increasing day by day. Publishers are releasing an increasing number of Chinese language textbooks. All textbooks available for Chinese learners can be divided into two categories, including ones published in China and others published in Russia. It should be noted that Chinese textbooks are mainly used by students abroad. These textbooks neither usually give due attention to the Russian language and culture from the point of view of the books' content nor the cultural peculiarities of Russian students studying Chinese are taken into account. The problem is that the object of books application is not always understandable, and the content is often presented incorrectly (Chzhan Syaotszin, 2019). Textbooks are a crucial means of pedagogical activity; they directly affect the quality of teaching.

A Chinese language teacher needs to be able to select from the existing variety of textbooks those that will contribute to solving the strategic goal of teaching foreign languages, namely the formation of a secondary linguistic personality, and at the same time engage in creativity and create their textbooks. A textbook - in the broadest sense of the word - is a model of the learning process focused on a real-life learning system that fits into it and at the same time transforms it to a certain extent (Maslovets, 2013).

Textbooks are practical manuals written in the source language that should consider cross-cultural differences and the student's socio-cultural peculiarities, cognitive and psychological characteristics. Textbooks should be subject-oriented, communication-oriented, scientific, well-planned, and systematic. "Targeted" actually means "taking into account interstate differences," namely they must fully take into account the learning environment, learning conditions, learning habits, and tasks of Chinese language learners, as well as their native language and cultural characteristics.

The textbook "New Practical Course of the Chinese Language" - «新实用汉语课本» - is a Russified version of the book presented in six volumes and seventy lessons. The book is considered the most popular textbook of the Chinese language published in China and appreciated in Russian educational institutions. The textbook "New Horizons: An Integral Course of the Chinese Language" is written in Russian. The textbook, including texts that depict real-life situations, is also used by several schools. The manual is a series of textbooks that consists of two volumes. These textbooks consider interstate differences and can meet the needs of Chinese language learners at different levels, and will also contribute to the development of Chinese language teaching in Russia (Chzhan Syaotszin, 2019).

Language teaching as a system is presented by non-systemic and situation-given comments in textbooks designed and published in the PRC. Attempts to adapt Chinese educational aids to the Russian education system represent their restructuring to a linguistic approach (expansion and systematization of phonetic, lexical, and grammatical comments in the form of a system of rules, supplemented by translation tasks and communication-oriented activities). A bright example of such an edition is the textbook by A.F. Kondrashevsky, M.V. Rumyantseva, M.G. Frolov's "Practical Course of the Chinese Language" (as cited in Guruleva, 2019).

There are several Chinese textbooks for teaching Chinese language, based on modern concepts: 初级汉语口语, 中级汉语口语, 大众汉语中级交城, 桥梁：实用汉语中级教程 and many others. The principle of the organization of educational material used in the textbooks may differ from situational to thematic, but the speech and language material is about the same.

The lack of native language and culture usage, insufficient systematic teaching of reading at the elementary level, and the development of some basic language skills are the most typical problems of such textbooks. While using domestic and foreign courses simultaneously, it is possible to notice different approaches to the selection, the sequence of presentation, and the number of exercises for doing phonetic, lexical, and grammatical drills. All this makes it much more complicated to use foreign textbooks when teaching Chinese from the very beginning. The choices of topics and situations, language and speech exercises in these courses do not always correlate with the requirements of domestic university curricula, which also cause many inconveniences.

Conclusion

The development of the ability to perceive national and cultural values of the target language, training the subjects of the educational process for a successful dialogue of cultures, and the development of the ability to overcome linguistic and cultural differences to achieve productive intercultural interaction make the basis of intercultural education. For successful dialogue of cultures, the formation of values of a new socio-cultural environment should occupy one of the most leading positions aimed at assimilation of norms, values, customs, and traditions of a target society and culture as a whole with recognition of a person as the highest value, and encouraging participants of intercultural interaction to develop and show empathy and tolerance. When choosing the most successful Chinese language textbook, it is necessary to consider the national and cultural values reflected in them, which aim at forming a socio-cultural foundation, allowing a person to prepare for intercultural interaction.

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