Volume 41, Issue 3

Chinese as a second language (CSL) policy makers and scholars began to introduce task-based language teaching (TBLT) to CSL teaching more than a decade ago. However, policy innovations or theoretical precepts are not necessarily the blueprints of teachers’ classroom practice. It is assumed that teachers are more likely to accept or apply the new approach if the new philosophy is concordant with their existing beliefs. This study attempts to examine the prospect of TBLT application in CSL teaching by exploring the extent to which TBLT philosophy has found its way into CSL teachers’ beliefs. The research also probes into teachers’ practices to explore whether their beliefs in TBLT could be actualized. A questionnaire, classroom observations and interviews have been employed. The results indicate that the Chinese teachers have strong faith in the effectiveness of TBLT, but they doubt its feasibility. Their difficulties and confusion in realizing their beliefs in practice, in turn, lead to their faith in TBLT philosophy having a peripheral status in their belief system. This may imply the bi-directional causal relationships between teachers’ beliefs and practices. The factors revealed make clear the responsibilities or measures to be taken at social-cultural, institutional and internal levels. The findings generate empirical insights into implementations of pedagogical innovations.

This study investigates word recognition processes and strategies of intermediate learners of Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) in contextual reading settings. Two intermediate CSL learners were chosen as research participants, and think-aloud methods and retrospective interviews were used to collect data. The data were analyzed by using Moustakas’ data analysis procedure, Creswell’s three steps and Bogdon and Biklen’s data analysis methods. Results indicated that intermediate CSL learners go through different processes of word recognition as it might be automatic, based on context, pronunciation, previous knowledge and the meaning of characters, or, in case of word recognition failure, skipping the words or skipping them but reading them again later; and their word recognition strategies in contextual reading settings mainly include cognitive strategies and self-regulatory strategies. Among these strategies, cognitive strategies consist of direct transformation, translation, interpretation, guessing, inferring and finding key words; and self-regulatory strategies include metacognitive strategies, behavior regulating strategies, emotion regulating strategies and motivation regulating strategies. A model of intermediate CSL learners’ word recognition strategies can be constructed based on the results. The present study provides both theoretical and pedagogical implications in the field of CSL vocabulary acquisition and teaching.

This paper reports a case study that explores elementary learners’ reading anxiety over Chinese as a second language (CSL). Two elementary CSL learners were chosen as research participants. Lived experience descriptions, think-aloud, retrospective interviews, field observations, and research journal writings were used to investigate the sources of elementary CSL learners’ reading anxiety and the ways employed to reduce their reading anxiety. The data were analyzed by Moustakas’ (1994) data analysis procedures, Creswell’s (2007) three steps, and Bogdon & Biklen’s (1992) data analysis methods. Results show that elementary CSL learners do have reading anxiety in their reading process and the sources of the anxiety include cross-linguistic differences between English and Chinese expressions, lack of previous knowledge, difficult and complex vocabulary, wrong guesses, and comprehension difficulties. Both participants tried to use strategies such as guessing, looking up words, understanding two character words based on the meaning of each character, skipping and keeping reading, and using previous knowledge to predict the rest of the text to reduce their reading anxiety. The present study provides both theoretical and pedagogical implications in the field of CSL reading learning and teaching.

One of the characteristics of good writing is appropriate use of cohesive devices, which many learners often find difficult to do. Although there is a substantial body of research on cohesion in writing, little has been documented on how to teach it to EFL students. The present study was an attempt to address this under-researched issue by taking a terminological approach, as the diverse and vague terminology used to describe link words has been found to be more of a hindrance than a facilitator in the teaching/learning process. A total of 16 cohesion-related terms were surveyed to find out about the quality and quantity of their use in a self-built corpus of 14 grammar books of different levels. Furthermore, a test was run to measure students’ familiarity with these terms, and field-notes were taken while scoring the students’ papers in their presence. The findings, in addition to giving insights into the usage points regarding each of the 16 terms, led to drawing a terminological network, which, if used consistently, could help in teaching and learning to use cohesion effectively.

This paper addresses the issue of Chinese students’ oral English skills in talking about Chinese culture from the perspective of conversation analysis. To examine their performance in this regard, group discussion data in the classroom were collected for analysis. Their oral skills in talking about Chinese New Year and Christmas, a Western festival, were analyzed and compared to determine their oral performance in describing their native culture. Comments by two native English speakers on the students’ performance are used to complement the conversation analysis. The results indicate that, compared with their performance regarding Christmas, the students were able to express a wider range of cultural connotations about Chinese New Year in English, but they used significantly fewer correct culturally-loaded words and phrases, and switched to Chinese much more frequently, suggesting unsatisfactory oral skills in describing Chinese culture.

Since the turn of the century, higher education policy in China has highlighted the importance of cultivating students’ intercultural competences, particularly in the context of English language teaching. In spite of this, studies show that to this day Chinese ELT classrooms in higher education have rarely taken a cultural turn and teachers’ understanding of interculturalism remains insufficient. This paper reports an action research study on how intercultural awareness was developed in the context of an English reading course at an independent college of a major Chinese university. The study followed a teaching flow that integrates intercultural learning with critical thinking by challenging students to select, analyze, and raise questions about English texts on aspects of Chinese culture. Mapping the outputs of a cohort of 77 second-year undergraduate students onto Baker’s (2012; 2015) model of intercultural awareness, the study shows that a majority of participants demonstrated a level beyond basic awareness. The paper concludes that reading courses can be used to help foster intercultural awareness among Chinese students, and it offers some pedagogical and theoretical reflections on integrating intercultural learning with ELT, and formulates a number of suggestions for further studies.

The experiment presented in this research is targeting a ‘positional’ stage of a ‘modular’ model of speech production originally proposed by Levelt (1989), Bock & Levelt (1994), where selected lemmas are inserted into syntactic frames. Results suggest a difference between L1 and L2 English speakers at the positional stage. While this might suggest that the speech planning process is different in native and non-native speakers, an alternative view is also proposed that the observed differences are the result of differences in the way that linguistic forms are stored, rather than a fundamental difference in the way that speech is planned. This result indicates main verb, copula be & local dependency effect are the three elements that affect the realization of English subject-verb agreement, and helps us locate the phase where L2 subject-verb agreement errors happen.