Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The spread of Chinese culture to the world is of great significance in the current era. As a compulsory course for international students, China Overview is aiming at helping international students to understand China and cultivate international students who are knowledgeable about China and friendly to China. This paper analyses the content settings, key chapters and writing concepts of two China Overview textbooks that are currently in large circulation, commonly used in our university, as well as the distribution of the content, the writing angle and the hotspots of concern from the students’ final assignments in the last two years. It is found that the course materials have achieved the popularization of relevant basic knowledge and realized the course objectives quite well, but the hotspots of students’ concern do not overlap with the key points introduced in the textbooks to a high extent and the students' concern for current affairs hotspots as well as China's new development cannot be satisfied in class. Based on this, it is concluded that the teaching materials should play the role of popularization and guidance, and serve as the basic materials for knowledge learning, but there should be an accompanying database updated from time to time to provide more information about the hot topics and new developments, which could also provide students with relevant information on their points of interest to study by themselves. In addition, more open-ended or experiential questions should be provided in the exercise section to encourage students to carry out personalized exploration.
Authors: Ji Dongzhen, Pan Weiwei
Institution: University of Shanghai for Science and Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4409978059