ABSTRACT
The innovation described in this chapter is an ongoing, large project, which is still very much at the research stage. It concerns revising the cultural content of Chinese secondary school textbooks and research to establish what might be meaningful and authentic innovation for students. Based on interviews with students, we argue that a long established ‘native speaker’ model of ELT and an equally long-standing view of culture, both as curriculum content and as a construction of language learners, have influenced the secondary school curriculum in such a way that it has been taken away from the ‘real worlds’ of Chinese students, and that an innovative approach to culture and the curriculum is required to address this.
