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China–Africa Language and Cultural Exchange
  • ISSN: 2040-199X
  • E-ISSN: 1751-7974
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Abstract

Amid the ongoing wave of globalization, interest in learning Chinese continues to grow across Africa, driving an increasing demand for Chinese language education and fostering more dynamic cross-cultural exchanges. However, the teaching of Chinese as a second language faces the dual challenge of creating innovative teaching methods and enhancing the effectiveness of cultural dissemination. This article, grounded in the theory of cross-cultural resonance through artistic media, examines Chinese language education in Nigeria as a case study to conduct an in-depth analysis of the practical effectiveness of singing-based teaching methods in Nigerian Chinese language education. The study focuses on Chinese language learners in Nigeria over the past five years, using a mixed research design that combines quantitative experimental data with semi-structured in-depth interviews. It constructs a three-stage teaching paradigm of ‘phoneme perception – phrase memory – pragmatic transfer’ and reveals its multimodal synergistic mechanism: musical rhythm enhances learners’ phonetic perception sensitivity by reinforcing the neural encoding of tones. The repetitive structure of lyrics promotes the consolidation of procedural memory, enabling natural and fluent language output and the musical expression of cultural imagery, leveraging the effects of embodied cognition, which facilitates the deep internalization and contextual application of cultural schemes, further stimulating learners’ cross-cultural identity. The research results indicate that the singing teaching method can enhance learners’ oral expression abilities, cultural understanding accuracy and pragmatic flexibility while effectively reducing the cognitive load associated with tone acquisition and accelerating the extraction and application of cross-cultural concepts. This study validates the optimizing effect of multimodal teaching, represented by the singing teaching method, on second language acquisition, providing theoretical support and practical references for constructing a Chinese teaching model with cross-cultural adaptability and also promoting Sino-African cultural exchange.

© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Intellect Ltd.
This article is Open Access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The CC BY licence permits commercial and noncommercial reuse. To view a copy of the licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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2026-03-31
2026-04-16

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Multimodal synergy and third-order paradigm construction: An innovative cross-cultural study of singing pedagogy in Chinese language education in Nigeria
Journal of African Media Studies 17, 349 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1386/jams_00143_1
/content/journals/10.1386/jams_00143_1
/content/journals/10.1386/jams_00143_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): cognitive load; cross-cultural emotional resonance; cultural schemas; embodied cognition; language proficiency; pragmatic transfer

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