Volume 44, Issue 3 - Special Issue on The Xu-Based Approach to Second Language Learning, Guest Editor: Chuming WANG

This special issue provides an overview of the xu -argument, a newly emerging view on language acquisition. The view is new in that it makes two key points: i) language is acquired through xu , a Chinese word with a composite meaning of completion, extension and creation (CEC) (Wang, 2016), and ii) high efficiency in learning a language is achieved by xu . Using a single word to capture the highly complex human endowment of language learning might be too ambitious an attempt. Convincing justifications and supporting evidence are needed to verify this claim, as the papers in this issue are intended to do.

Dialogues are fundamentally driven by xu (C. Wang, 2016, 2017), a Chinese word meaning continuation that captures the process in which interlocutors participate in interaction through the actions of (utterance) completion, (content) extension, and (topic) creation (CEC). This article reports a conversation analytic case study designed to investigate how the continuation strategies of CEC are used in real-time communication to achieve mutual understanding, and thus to construct intersubjectivity (Verhagen, 2005) and promote the development of second language (L2) interactional competence. Our data consisted of audio and video recordings of a 25-minute conversation between two L2 English speakers, one expert and one novice, and a stimulated recall interview with them. Results revealed that the expert employed CEC at the early stage of interaction to maintain successful communication, and the novice gradually aligned with the expert and used CEC to achieve mutual understanding, construct intersubjectivity, and create opportunities for interaction and learning at the late stage, displaying her development of L2 interactional competence. Our findings have useful implications for theoretical and methodological development of the xu-argument studies as well as for xu-based L2 pedagogy.

This study investigated how the mode in which the reading-writing integrated continuation task was conducted modulates the effects of second language (L2) syntactic alignment, through the English motion event construction with manner verbs. Ninety Chinese students were assigned to either of the two experimental groups or a control group, and they all experienced a pretest, an alignment phase and a posttest. In the alignment phase, the two experimental groups completed a reading-writing integrated continuation task but in different modes. For the multi-turn mode, participants reconstructed a picture story by continuing the episodes extracted from the story with one episode presented and continued at a time; for the single-turn mode, the first half of the same picture story was presented as a chunk, and then participants read and continued it. Results show that L2 learners aligned with the target structure in completing the story, and the alignment effect was retained in the posttest conducted after a delay of two weeks. Moreover, syntactic alignment was modulated by task mode with the multi-turn group exhibiting stronger immediate and longterm alignment effects. We conclude that the continuation task is a fruitful context for L2 structural alignment, and the magnitude of alignment effect hinges on interactive intensity.

This study aims to uncover the relationship between interaction and alignment in a reading-speaking integrated continuation task, especially focusing on whether an increase in interaction intensity can lead to stronger alignment and further generate positive effects on L2 learning. To this end, 31 participants were asked to perform reading-speaking integrated continuation tasks under three different conditions featuring low, medium and high interaction intensity respectively. The results showed that 1) alignment existed in the reading-speaking integrated continuation task; 2) increasing interaction intensity generated stronger alignment at both linguistic and situational levels; 3) growing interaction intensity contributed to more coherent and accurate L2 oral production. These findings not only proved the workings of mind-body-world alignment, but also testified that increasing interaction intensity could bring about a stronger alignment effect (Wang, 2010), which then contributed to better L2 oral performance. These findings confirm again the role of interaction in L2 learning and suggest that alignment could possibly be a mediating factor that links interaction and L2 development. Pedagogical implications for teaching and learning L2 speaking are discussed.

This study investigated the efficiency of learning the Chinese numeral classifiers by L2 Chinese learners by means of an alignment-oriented task. Participants were a total of 96 intermediate learners of L2 Chinese, who were randomly assigned to two experimental groups and one control group, with each group consisting of 32 participants. The continuation task used in this study consisted of a picture-based Chinese text depicting a room with an array of objects, which necessitates the use of classifiers. The two experimental groups were both required to first read the text and then write to describe their own rooms in comparison with the one in the text. One group was instructed to use the classifiers from the text as much as possible in their writing, whereas the other was not required to do so. Participants in the control group were first given the picture to look at in the absence of the text and then asked to describe their own rooms. The results showed that the continuation task significantly enhanced participants’ retention of the Chinese numeral classifiers, suggesting that the alignment-based approach is an effective way to learn difficult linguistic categories such as the Chinese classifiers.

This paper reports on a study on the effects of reading-writing integrated tasks on vocabulary learning and explored the differential roles of creative construction and non-creative construction in promoting lexical learning. Participants were 90 first-year English majors, randomly assigned to two experimental groups (continuation and retelling) and one control group, with 30 students in each group. Results showed that the continuation group generated a substantial amount of creative construction and produced significantly more instances of creative imitation than the retelling group. The continuation group outperformed the retelling group for both receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge gain and retention, but differences were only significant in terms of productive vocabulary retention. Finally, productive vocabulary knowledge retention among the continuation group was significantly and positively correlated with creative imitation (meaning creation coupled with language imitation), but not with linguistic alignment per se. As productive vocabulary knowledge constitutes the learner ’ s ability to use lexical knowledge to express ideas in dynamic contexts, the findings afforded evidence that creative imitation could be the answer to the fundamental issue of L2 learning (i.e., mapping static language onto dynamic idea expression). The pedagogical implications as well as future research directions are also discussed.

Based on the xu-argument, this study investigated the use of translation continuation tasks in commercial translation instruction. Forty-four second-year Business English majors at a Chinese university participated in the study. They were divided into equal-sized control and experimental groups. Members of the experimental group were asked to read Chinese-English parallel texts from a user manual, while those of the control group were asked to read the Chinese text only. Subsequently, both groups were required to translate the continued Chinese text into English. The results indicated the following: 1) the experimental group’s translated text was of significantly higher quality than that of the control group; and 2) the experimental group’s translations were well-aligned with the original text in their use of terminology, sentence structure, and stylistic features. The study concludes by suggesting that translation continuation tasks can improve commercial translation instruction and hence should be further applied in practice.

Although the story continuation writing task (SCWT) has attracted much research attention, few studies have investigated the construct of the task, particularly with respect to which language competence it focuses on. In addition, although some studies have demonstrated that China’s Standards of English Language Ability (CSE) provides comprehensive insights into the development of Chinese learners’ English language proficiency, little research has investigated the relationship between CSE and SCWT. This study drew upon the CSE to develop an SCWT language use inventory to address the above research gaps. A total of 358 high school students were asked to complete the questionnaire, of which 277 valid responses were analyzed. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) on the CSE-based questionnaire revealed the presence of six factors, namely language correctness, language variety, task planning, connecting-and-generating, selecting-and-mining, and organizing. The strategy of connecting-and-generating was the only significant predictor of the learners’ SCWT scores. The paper also discusses the findings relating to the SCWT rating and other integrated writing tasks.

The present study employed a quantitative and network approach to detect alignment effects in second language (L2) continuation tasks designed on the xu-argument (Wang, 2016). The materials used in this study were 6 sub-corpora consisting of two selected input stories and two groups of L2 written production based on two continuation tasks. During continuation, the participants were required to continue in English a story with its ending removed, with one group reading and continuing the Chinese version and the other group the English version, and then switching their roles in the two tasks. Results show that the alignment effect differs across the two versions of continuation. Specifically, compared with the Chinese-version continuation, L2 learners produced more use of unigrams and bigrams similar to the input story in terms of lexical items, frequency and ranking correlations in the English-version task; on the other hand, the English-version continuation can facilitate generating linguistic networks that are much closer to the native English networks. Moreover, this research corroborates that written production in L2 continuation tasks can be influenced by input content.

This study examines the effects of reading-listening integrated dictation on Chinese college-level English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ listening. Different from previous research that explored reading while listening for listening development, this study combined the two skills in dictation in which listening was a continuation of reading. Participants were two groups of first-year Chinese EFL learners who were exposed to the target language under two conditions: the traditional dictation (i. e., listening-only) and the reading-listening integrated dictation in a counterbalanced order. Three datasets were collected: listening performance, perception questionnaires and follow-up interviews. Results indicated that the reading-listening integrated dictation was superior in terms of learning gains from listening and that their effect was commensurate with dictation text difficulty. The findings also showed that the reading-listening integrated dictation could enhance EFL students’ confidence and interest and make the use of strategies possible during listening.