Intercultural Competence in the Context of Teaching Chinese in Sri Lanka: Ideology vs Spirituality

Significant transformations have occurred in the anatomy of societies along with rapid digitalisation, migration, and language change, which, in liaison with various other influencers, have highlighted the need to incorporate intercultural competence into education. The qualitative and quantitative changes that have occurred in teaching Chinese in Sri Lanka in the recent past have stemmed new paradigm shifts in curriculum development, teaching methods and material for teaching Chinese language, of which consolidating intercultural competence is indispensable. The present study has examined the existing modes and extents of intercultural competencies incorporated into teaching Chinese in Sri Lanka from the perspectives of ideology and culture. The study adopts a convergent parallel design juxtaposing qualitative and quantitative data from the informants to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the situation. The results indicate that the informants' preference is more toward learning cultural content, especially content related to spirituality, than ideological content in language learning. The limitations of the Sri Lankan CFL learners' cross-cultural knowledge are clearly depicted by the low performance of informants in identifying rudimentary Indic loanwords in Chinese. Existing teaching material, approaches and language policy planning have to be reassessed and redesigned to cope with rapid language change and increasing diversity of learners.