ABSTRACT

This chapter gives an overview of Chinese mother language education in mainland China, especially how it is taught in primary schools. The author first carried out a scientometric analysis using a tool called CiteSpace to reveal the main research strands of first-language education in China, especially on Mandarin teaching in primary schools. The keywords identified included ‘emotional education’ (情感教育), ‘Chinese character teaching’ (汉字教学), ‘children’s literature’ (儿童文学) and so on. Several themes of research strands were then identified from the one hundred or so keywords extracted by the meta-analysis tool. Each strand is then investigated by zooming in on some representative papers published in China’s leading academic journals. The selected keywords and their elaborations in the form of literature review provide the background information necessary for understanding the current status of L1 education in China. The chapter then examines the curriculum of mother tongue education in China and compares it with a British one, before reviewing a US-China comparative study, so that the similarities and differences of first-language education policies can be teased out between China and the West. A subsequent section then compares the language varieties and curricular differences between China and Taiwan revealing the heterogeneous nature of the official Chinese language and its implication on L1 education in different Chinese regions. Towards the end of the chapter, some speculations on the implications of the findings to teaching Chinese as L2 are offered as future directions.