Volume 4, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Focus on East Asia: Language learning and teaching

British higher education is becoming more and more market-driven following the increase in tuition fees in 2012. As a result, universities need to respond more readily to the market, and student demand and the high employability of graduates are now a priority for most universities. With the growing importance of Asian economies in the new age of globalisation, there is an increasing interest in learning languages such as Chinese, especially among those who intend to seek Asia-related jobs upon the completion of their university studies. These diversified language needs represent both opportunities and challenges for university language centres, which are known for their responsiveness to changes in demand, innovativeness in their language teaching, and flexibility in their service provision. It is not uncommon that university language centres offer Asian language courses, but there is still a lot to be done if compared with their more established teaching practices in European languages. University language centres should consider working in a collaborative and coordinated manner, not only to assess, anticipate and prepare for changes in higher education, but also to manage and shape changes in language learning and teaching with a more diverse language profile.

This study explores the effectiveness and challenges of a collaborative drama project conducted in a beginner-level Japanese language university class. The project had two main objectives: firstly, it encouraged students to focus on linguistic elements during the process of writing, examining and editing the scenario, and to embed it in an authentic context; secondly it aimed to raise student self-awareness of how to project attitude and emotion in their speaking parts, followed by feedback from native Japanese speakers. Seven students from the U.S., Germany, Ukraine, Algeria and Poland and four Japanese student volunteers participated in the three-week project. Students first discussed an outline and created a detailed image of characters and scenes. Then, the students in pairs created a scenario that was examined and edited through class discussion with focus on form in context. Finally, students practiced their roles with Japanese volunteers and filmed a 10-minute drama that was presented for another Japanese class and guests. Three significant improvements in students' Japanese skills and awareness were observed during the project: students were able to critically analyse and negotiate the best ways to use their Japanese language resources in the context, they became aware of why their direct translations from English to Japanese and word choices do not always work, and they were able to speak in a lively and active way beyond reading the texts. Students reported that they acquired various ways of using Japanese and became more confident in speaking with native speakers.

For learners of Japanese, a conundrum arises at university level as they are expected to be able to shift between direct and indirect language in various writing tasks. The apparent indirectness in inductive language is required of regular writing tasks such as response essays and e-mails, while the directness of deductive academic writing, a quality traditionally attributed to academic writing in the West, is now a universally accepted quality of academic writing in any language. This shift can cause confusion for students, perhaps in part due to the widespread misunderstanding of it by linguistics researchers from the West in the past. This is not to suggest that English speakers, for example, do not make similar shifts in language use from non-academic to academic registers, but for learners of Japanese as a second language, the shift is less understood. In this article, I draw on some original data to support the posited theories. While instructors may make a clear distinction between the direct and indirect genres of writing, students do not always make the same distinction. Students may display a clear understanding of the Western criticisms of Japanese rhetorical approaches, but experience confusion when trying to meet the writing expectations of their instructors. University instructors of Japanese need to address the Western criticisms when clarifying the specific genres and uses of particular rhetorical approaches in written Japanese, and put more emphasis on the differences between written and spoken Japanese.

Recently, the use of children's picture books to teach English has been increasing in Japan. An advantage of these books is the high proportion of basic vocabulary they include. Can picture books also be useful for teaching Japanese students Italian and increasing their motivation? The present study analyses the effectiveness of employing a picture book for Italian instruction using a questionnaire survey administered to 39 Japanese learners of Italian at three Japanese universities. L'Acca in fuga by Gianni Rodari and Nicola Buiat was enjoyed by more than 92% of the participants. A total of 92.3% admitted that their degree of interest in the content was linked with their motivation to read children's literature in Italian. In addition, 58.9% admitted to experiencing a sense of fulfilment after reading the book, thus increasing their motivation to learn the language. As for grammatical aspects, 74.3% agreed that the book was useful for learning several types of past tense. Moreover, 69.2% and 79.5% agreed that the picture book effectively helped them understand the conditional and subjunctive moods. Based on these results, we conclude that picture books can facilitate significant adult learning. Japanese adult learners described enjoying the experience of reading Italian picture books at university, and found them to be useful for learning grammar, developing vocabulary and enhancing their intercultural understanding.

This study explores the effectiveness of guided reflective journals to improve intelligibility in a Japanese higher educational context. Based on qualitative and quantitative methods, the paper evaluates changes in speech over the duration of one semester. In particular, this study focuses on changes in prosodic features such as stress, intonation and pausing in a small group of 22 students who were studying English at one university in Japan. Segmental features are also considered. Results from this study show that the goal-setting strategies embedded in the reflective journals served to direct autonomous learning efforts and motivated the participants from the experimental group to improve more than the control group, especially with regard to word stress, intonation and pausing. While the participants from the experimental group focused their learning goals mainly on prosodic features, no significant improvements were made in segmental features. While further research is needed in this area, this paper shows that guided reflective journals may be one intervention strategy to support learning and improve the pronunciation skills of EFL learners. However, further research is needed to explore the use and benefits of guided reflective journals as an independent learning tool to improve pronunciation.

There is increasing enrolment of Chinese heritage language learners in tertiary Chinese language classrooms across Australia. Educated in English, Chinese heritage learners are of diverse national origins and the Chinese language varieties to which they have been exposed through family or community are also diverse. Recent research in this field has called for greater attention to pedagogical questions in heritage language study, entailing a better understanding of learners and their learning motivation. This study was driven by pedagogical concern as to the perceived underachievement of the learner group and low retention rate at the beginner level. Through an analysis of quantitative survey data and qualitative interview data, the study closely examines the particular motivational orientations, learning needs, and goals of a group of Chinese heritage language learners in one Australian university setting. Motivation from heritage and cultural identity is balanced by the drive towards employment prospects, or perceived economic capital of learning Chinese. The students' goal of communicative competence is at odds with the apparent traditional Chinese teaching goals, which have stressed complex written literacy construction. This study fills a significant gap in the field by identifying research-based pedagogic implications and strategies for teaching Chinese heritage learners in the Australian context.

This paper presents the results of a one-year language curriculum needs analysis project aimed at developing a deeper understanding of the learning needs of first and second year Chinese language students at a university in the United States. The purpose of this project was to provide a foundation for further curriculum development of the university's Chinese language program by assessing student learning needs within the first and second year courses as perceived by the students and their teachers. The data for this project were collected through anonymous questionnaires distributed to teachers and students, personal interviews with the university's Chinese language teachers and first/second year students, and classroom observations conducted by the researcher. Through a quantitative analysis of the collected data, this paper focuses on the perceived needs of the students, and gives special attention to the differences in perceptions between students and teachers regarding these needs. This needs analysis project aimed to provide an example for other researchers and institutions in developing language curricula, particularly in the context of Chinese language studies.

This article reviews the current research on stroke order of hanzi (as used to write the Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages) in teaching Chinese as a second language (CSL). Based on an extensive review of current research on stroke order, it first discusses the importance and difficulty of stroke order in hanzi learning. It goes on to present the mixed attitudes held by CSL learners and teachers towards learning stroke order, followed by a synthesis of the literature on stroke order errors and current methods of displaying and practising stroke order. Finally, some key implications for teaching and learning stroke order are suggested, and future research directions are proposed for the Chinese language classroom.

The current study investigates the applications of the pinyin input system, a Chinese word processing method, for writing on Facebook in order to help CFL (Chinese as a foreign language) learners from two Irish universities to improve their handwriting in Chinese characters on paper. The data were collected from writing activities conducted over 12 weeks on Facebook, which was the platform for the research, and then from an exam question written on paper. Analysis of the data show that inputting Chinese in pinyin on Facebook did not significantly contribute to either the number of characters used or the lexical variation of the participants' handwriting on paper. However, accuracy in the characters used was significantly higher on Facebook than in those written with conventional pen and paper, since by using the pinyin input system, the learners could use their phonological knowledge of the characters and then needed only to recognise the correct characters. Two unexpected findings emerged from the data: one was that the participants' engagement with the social affordances of Facebook was limited; the second was the use of machine translation when writing online. The study provides invaluable insights into the possibilities of applying social networking and machine translation in the language classroom for CFL learners with both low and high command of the Chinese language.

Twitter is becoming increasingly popular as a medium for language learning. This study explores self-directed learning via social interactions that use Twitter as an interactive learning environment. The participants in this study were thirty university students of Chinese as a foreign language at levels 1 and 2 of the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK). Prior to the Twitter activity they self-assessed their confidence on content topics and made plans to self-direct their learning for seven weeks. In addition, they all took part in a training session in which they were given written instructions on how to tweet in a group message-board setting. The data that were collected included students' responses to a motivation questionnaire before and after the Twitter activity (pre and post motivation), their tweets, their evaluation of the Twitter activity, and their learning achievement based on their scores in the final exam. The analysis of their tweets is related to the curriculum content and their Twitter (activity) plan. The results showed that the students created an interactive learning environment to practice their Chinese with their peers in active sentence constructions. Students' Twitter behavior and motivation for using Twitter to practice Chinese correlated significantly with their learning achievement. In addition, students became familiar with a range of choices to practice Chinese. However, half of them failed to follow the Twitter plan they had drawn up and only one-fifth of their tweets involved social interactions. Finally, barriers to and suggestions for future research on microblogging in the learning of Chinese are discussed.

Peer teaching has been used as a mechanism for promoting learner autonomy in a range of language learning contexts. This article explores how absolute beginners in a Chinese class can engage in reciprocal peer teaching (RPT) from the start of their language learning experience and how this contributes to the development of their autonomy as learners in addition to improving their linguistic competence in Chinese. RPT, as it is implemented in this study, entails students working in teaching teams, with each team taking responsibility in turn to teach the whole class during a short beginners' course in Chinese. The study was conducted as an action research project in three cycles, with modifications to the form and content of students' engagement in each cycle based on analysis of data from students' reflective language learning journals and group reports. The findings suggest that the cooperative and challenging activity of RPT fostered students' individual responsibility and motivation for learning while at the same time developing group solidarity in the classes. Individual and group development together served to promote the learner autonomy. The findings also suggest that the reciprocal element, whereby each student identifies with both teacher and learner roles at some point during the course, is critical in this intervention, functioning as a catalyst for students' activities.