Contextualizing Generic Pedagogical Knowledge through Tension-focused Reflection: A Self-study

A major concern in recent decades is that teachers are equipped with pedagogical knowledge through pre-service teacher education programs but know nothing about how to put pedagogical knowledge into their own teaching scenarios. Hence, an increasing attention has been attached to teachers’ contextualized understanding of pedagogical knowledge for effective teaching. Reflection has often been recommended as an instrument for constructing teachers’ context-specific knowledge of teaching. This self-study has identified an approach of reflection by which I, as a beginning Chinese language teacher-researcher, employed to develop contextualized understanding of a generic pedagogical model known as Quality Teaching (QT). The essence of such reflection, named as tension-focused reflection, is to reflect on and then manage tensions arising from implementing the generic pedagogical model in my own teaching. Tension-focused reflection enhanced my contextualization of QT in Chinese language classroom by prompting deep thinking about the contextual restrictions for implementing QT, the subject-specific usefulness of QT, and the consequences of such implementation on subject-specific practice. Yielded by such thinking was my contextualized application of QT that was useful for my teaching Chinese as a foreign language. While unfolding the process of developing and applying tension-focused reflection, this self-study also confirmed the value of teacher reflection for beginning teachers’ development and encouraged teachers’ innovative approaches of reflection which meets their own needs

A review of technology-enhanced Chinese character teaching and learning in a digital context

The acquisition of Chinese characters has been widely acknowledged as challenging for learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) due to their unique logographic nature and the time and effort involved. However, recent advancements in instructional technologies demonstrate a promising role in facilitating the teaching and learning of Chinese characters. This paper examines studies exploring technology-enhanced character teaching and learning (TECTL) through a systematic literature review of relevant publications produced between 2010 and 2021. The synthesized findings shed insights on the research undertaken in the TECTL field, identifying a focus on characters’ component disassembling, re-assembling, and associations among orthography, semantics, and phonology. In addition, learners’ perceptions toward the use of technology and the benefits of various types of technological tools are also discussed in detail. Implications for TECTL are also put forward for future pedagogical practice and exploration

Improving Cross-Domain Chinese Word Segmentation with Word Embeddings

Cross-domain Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) remains a challenge despite recent progress in neural-based CWS. The limited amount of annotated data in the target domain has been the key obstacle to a satisfactory performance. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised word-based approach to improving cross-domain CWS given a baseline segmenter. Particularly, our model only deploys word embeddings trained on raw text in the target domain, discarding complex hand-crafted features and domain-specific dictionaries. Innovative subsampling and negative sampling methods are proposed to derive word embeddings optimized for CWS. We conduct experiments on five datasets in special domains, covering domains in novels, medicine, and patent. Results show that our model can obviously improve cross-domain CWS, especially in the segmentation of domain-specific noun entities. The word F-measure increases by over 3.0% on four datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art semi-supervised and unsupervised cross-domain CWS approaches with a large margin. We make our code and data available on Github

A Crosslinguistic/Cultural Perspective of Learning Chinese as a Foreign Language in Canadian Universities

This study examines adult student learning of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) in a Canadian university context, focusing in particular on how students’ diverse prior language(s) and experiences influence their CFL learning and how student motivation develops. It aims at gaining a better understanding of the nature of adult CFL learning; at yielding pedagogic implications and raising questions for further research. Framed by sociocultural theory and cognitive linguistic perspectives, the research was guided by the following questions: 1) What elements of Chinese as a foreign language challenge student learning? 2) How do students’ prior language(s) and language learning experience influence their CFL learning? 3) How does student motivation influence CFL learning and develop in CFL study? This is a qualitative multicase study with university students in Canada studying Chinese as a foreign language. Multiple data collection methods were employed such as survey, interviews, observation, and review of students’ written work. This study yielded the following pedagogic and research implications: The pedagogical implications for CFL curriculum development and pedagogical improvement point to: 1) the importance of pedagogic knowledge in CFL instruction; 2) the need to attune curriculum and syllabus to students’ learning characteristics, needs, interests, and expectations; 3) the need for commitment to prompt feedback on students’ assignments; 4) the importance of identifying opportunities for experiential learning to stimulate student motivation; and 5) the importance of offering students socio-psychological support in addition to academic support; as well as 6) encouraging peer collaboration. Specific to CFL instruction, the study indicates the need to pay particular attention to the teaching of Chinese tones and characters. The implications for further research can be focused on the inquiries into: 1) comparison of the errors by students from different language backgrounds (e.g. Oriental languages and European languages) to capture the learning characteristics of CFL learning; 2) CFL learner internal and external conditions for transfer of prior knowledge; 3) learning motivation: the influence of different contexts on motivational intensity (e.g. CFL learning in China and Canada); or the influence of different motivational orientations on student achievement

Personality Understanding of Fictional Characters during Book Reading

Comprehending characters' personalities is a crucial aspect of story reading. As readers engage with a story, their understanding of a character evolves based on new events and information; and multiple fine-grained aspects of personalities can be perceived. This leads to a natural problem of situated and fine-grained personality understanding. The problem has not been studied in the NLP field, primarily due to the lack of appropriate datasets mimicking the process of book reading. We present the first labeled dataset PersoNet for this problem. Our novel annotation strategy involves annotating user notes from online reading apps as a proxy for the original books. Experiments and human studies indicate that our dataset construction is both efficient and accurate; and our task heavily relies on long-term context to achieve accurate predictions for both machines and humans. The dataset is available at https://github.com/Gorov/personet_acl23.Comment: Accepted at ACL 202

An Investigation into American University Students’ Motivation for Chinese Learning: A Case Study

The study investigates the motivation behind learners of the Chinese language as a second language at the university level in the United States of America. The study uses Dornyei’s (1994a) three-level framework of L2 motivation and Dornyei’s (2001a) demotivation theory, as the theory guidelines. In addition, the study takes both quantitative and qualitative approaches and uses questionnaires and interviews for data collection. First, the study explores the various constructions of motivation for students learning Chinese at a public university in the New England region. All students who were enrolled in the elementary, intermediate, and advanced Chinese courses at the University in the fall semester of 2019 participated in this study. 108 valid questionnaires have been collected for this investigation. The data from these questionnaires were then analyzed in Excel and the results indicate that the highest motivation is instrumental motivation. The second-highest motivation is achievement motivation, the third is integrative motivation, and the fourth is positive learning attitudes and experiences motivation. While social milieu motivation and language requirement motivation are low. Second, the students were separated based on the students’ gender, ethnic backgrounds, and learning levels. The participants were divided into the following groups: male and female learners, learners of the Chinese heritage and non-heritage, and learners in the beginning, intermediate, and advanced level. The data from the questionnaires were then analyzed in SPSS, with results showing that there are significant differences pertaining to motivation between the female and the male groups as female students’ motivation is higher than that of male students. There were no significant differences found with the amount of motivation between the Chinese heritage and the non-heritage groups. However, the Chinese heritage students displayed much higher integrative and social milieu motivation than the non-heritage students. Furthermore, students of non-heritage background displayed significantly better achievement motivation than students of Chinese heritage. No significant differences with motivational levels between students of different learning levels were found. But in spite of that, there are considerable disparities between these three groups in terms of integrative motivation, language requirement motivation, and social milieu motivation. This study also explores factors that cause students’ demotivation to learn Chinese. The six highest demotivation factors are reported in the following: “Chinese is too difficult for me, tones, characters, grammar, and phrases, etc.”; “my exam grades cannot show my actual Chinese level”; “I feel upset because I put great effort in studying Chinese while making little progress”; “class activities are far too few and boring”; “I cannot understand my Chinese teacher because he/she speaks too fast and difficult for me”; “I do not like using the Chinese textbook”; and “too much homework.” Furthermore, students also complain about the curriculum being too fast-paced with too many exams and homework. Finally, after the analysis and discussion of the data and findings, corresponding pedagogical implications are suggested and explained

The Application and Impact of Artificial Intelligence in International Chinese Language Education: A Case Study of ChatGPT

This paper aims to explore how artificial intelligence technology plays a role in the field of international Chinese language education and its impact on Chinese teaching and learning. Taking ChatGPT as an example, this paper introduces its principle, function and advantages, analyzes its application scenarios and effects in Chinese education, discusses its possible challenges and problems, as well as its future development direction and suggestions. This paper argues that ChatGPT is a natural language generation technology based on deep learning, which can generate smooth, logical and emotional Chinese conversations based on user input. ChatGPT can provide diversified, personalized and interactive learning resources and teaching aids in international Chinese education, which is helpful to improve the quality and efficiency of Chinese teaching, stimulate learners’ learning motivation and interest, and promote cross-cultural communication and understanding. At the same time, ChatGPT also has some technical limitations and hidden dangers in social ethics. It is necessary to arouse the attention and vigilance of teachers and learners, reasonably regulate and use the technology, and ensure the healthy development of data security and man-machine relationship. This paper hopes to provide some reference and inspiration for the application of artificial intelligence technology in international Chinese education