Reframing Chinese Food Culture as a Curricular Resource in International Chinese Language Education

Abstract

International Chinese Language Education now asks learners to do more than remember vocabulary and produce correct sentences. They also need to understand how Chinese is used in ordinary cultural settings and how those meanings can be explained to people from different backgrounds. Chinese food is well suited to this task, yet its classroom use is still often limited to menu terms, festival activities, and short cultural notes. Drawing on literature analysis and theoretical synthesis, this article considers how food culture can be reorganized as a curricular resource. The discussion is developed from four connected perspectives: language learning, intercultural understanding, embodied cognition, and cultural communication. It argues that food-related teaching can place language in recognizable situations, provide concrete points for comparison, bring sensory participation into learning, and give students material for intercultural explanation. The article also identifies four practical weaknesses in current teaching: fragmented resources, shallow interpretation of symbols, one-off experiential activities, and limited training in cultural expression. In response, it proposes a language-cognition-experience-communication framework for curriculum design. The central claim is that food culture becomes educationally productive only when its materials are graded, its meanings are interpreted, its practices are revisited, and learners are asked to communicate what they have understood.