Teaching Chinese in Sweden: Textbook Traditions and Innovations

This chapter provides a brief review of the century-long history of Chinese language teaching in Sweden, starting with its classic local textbooks and tracing some of the teaching traditions reflected therein. The authors of these textbooks primarily include renowned sinologists such as Bernhard Karlgren, Göran Malmqvist, Cecilia Lindqvist, Torbjörn Lodén, and Lars Ragvald. Key concepts embodied in their textbooks include: emphasizing the characteristics of Swedish learners, particularly focusing on linguistic contrasts between Chinese and Swedish, highlighting the role of “sentence patterns” in grammar instruction, and leveraging morphemes to aid vocabulary annotation. In teaching Chinese characters, attention is given to the structural systematicity and cultural associations of characters, while fostering an atmosphere of appreciation for Chinese culture and language. Building on a summary of Swedish Chinese teaching traditions, this chapter further analyzes the significant insights these concepts offer for twenty-first-century Chinese language education, as well as the challenges they face in contemporary times, and proposes innovative strategies: actively aligning with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), introducing emerging methods such as “task-based teaching” and “digital Chinese character writing,” and utilizing advanced technologies like artificial intelligence to enhance teaching efficiency.