Is the Communicative Language Teaching Approach More Effective Than the Grammar Translation Method at Teaching the Ba-Construction in Mandarin Chinese to American Undergraduate Students?

Extensive research on second language teaching has been conducted on teaching English, other European languages or Chinese as a second language, but no quantitative study exists comparing the effectiveness of Communicative Language Teaching Approach (CLT) with that of Grammar Translation Method (GT) at teaching Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). The present study fills this gap. The purpose of this study is to investigate quantitatively which method is more effective at teaching the ba-construction in Mandarin Chinese to American CFL learners, CLT or GT. Sixty American students from introductory Chinese course at the University of Georgia (UGA) were given the opportunity to sign up for one of two classes to learn about the ba-construction. During one of the classes, thirty students learned under GT approach; during the other class, the remaining thirty students learned under CLT approach. The students, prior to signing up, were not aware of the method that would be used in their course. All students were tested before and after the course on three linguistic measures: Oral Production, Translation, and Meta-linguistic Awareness based on the ba-construction, and were scored on both occasions. A group of thirty Chinese students were also tested on the three measures but post-tested only and classroom teaching was unnecessary. They were included as reference group, not a "typical" control group. One-Way ANCOVA was conducted in SPSS. Pretest scores were entered into data analysis as covariates to control for possible pre-existing differences among the participants. Findings of this study showed that GT is statistically more effective than CLT at developing translation skills regarding the ba-construction. But this study produced no evidence regarding the superiority of GT or CLT at developing oral production skills or raising meta-linguistic awareness regarding the ba-construction, though both methods did appear to be highly significantly effective from pretests to posttests. This study has rich pedagogical implications and suggests meaningful directions for future studies on CFL instruction

Crosslinguistic Influence of Chinese EFL learners on English Acquisition

This thesis introduces both positive and negative crosslinguistic influence of Chinese EFL learners on English Acquisition. Most Chinese EFL learners have difficulties in English acquisition due to the negative crosslinguistic influence caused by the differences between mother tongue and the target language. In order to help Chinese EFL learners to tackle this problem, comparative analysis is done between English and Mandarin Chinese in terms of phonetics and phonology, morphology, part syntax, and pragmatics. The focus of this thesis is to investigate both the positive and negative crosslinguistic influence phenomena in the process of English acquisition conducted by Chinese EFL learners and the strategies of how to utilize the positive crosslinguistic influence and minimize the negative crosslinguistic influence on English learning. Both Chinese EFL teachers and learners will benefit from this thesis by acknowledging the crosslinguistic influence of their mother tongue on English acquisition and learning various English study methods

Corpus-Based Research on Chinese Language and Linguistics

This volume collects papers presenting corpus-based research on Chinese language and linguistics, from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. The contributions cover different fields of linguistics, including syntax and pragmatics, semantics, morphology and the lexicon, sociolinguistics, and corpus building. There is now considerable emphasis on the reliability of linguistic data: the studies presented here are all grounded in the tenet that corpora, intended as collections of naturally occurring texts produced by a variety of speakers/writers, provide a more robust, statistically significant foundation for linguistic analysis. The volume explores not only the potential of using corpora as tools allowing access to authentic language material, but also the challenges involved in corpus interrogation, analysis, and building

Late-stage grammatical change in Chinese: a constructional account

This thesis is a diachronic constructional exploration into late-stage grammatical change, defined as the creation of new grammatical constructions out of pre-existing grammatical ones, in Chinese. It argues that a multidimensional, constructional view on directionality in change, be it early or late stage, has advantages over a linear or unidirectional model, typical of the grammaticalisation approach. Chapters 1–3 lay down the groundwork for subsequent ones. Chapter 1 presents data and methodology. Chapter 2 discusses diachronic construction grammar, particularly the constructionalisation framework by Traugott & Trousdale (2013), and grammaticalisation. Chapter 3 introduces secondary grammaticalisation, which models late-stage grammatical change and assumes unidirectionality (that grammatical development proceeds in a highly contrained fashion) in the tradition of grammaticalisation, and evaluates its status within the constructionalisation framework. Chapters 4–7 constitute the major descriptive and analytical components of this thesis and propose three major generalisations. Chapters 4–5 show that modal and conditional constructions can develop into each other, manifesting bidirectionality rather than unidirectionality, both within and beyond Chinese. A prediction for bidirectionality is proposed: ‘the performative bidirectionality prediction’, which incorporates semanticisation via invited inferencing in the Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change and diachronic construction grammar, and requires no special late-stage process such as secondary grammaticalisation or degrammaticalisation. Chapter 6 models a category change from quantifier to classifier as ‘realignment’, or change in inheritance links from one schema to another. Following realignment, multiple classifier constructions were created, one of which is contentful. Implicating constructions at different levels, the changes cannot be easily accounted for within a unidirectional model. Furthermore, a ‘typology of reinforcement’ in historical linguistics is proposed to predict similar kinds of change. Chapter 7 examines schema loss, using as an example an adverbial adjunct schema with the paraphrase ‘something adverse almost happened’. A ‘prototypicality-based’ account of schema loss is posited, which parallels schema formation and involves different degrees of schematicity. Chapter 8 concludes by proposing that any regularity in language change is to be found in processes of change from a multidimensional, construction-specific perspective

Yě, yě, yě: On the syntax and semantics of Mandarin yě

This dissertation presents a description and analysis of the Mandarin particle yě ‘also’. It provides a comprehensive syntactic and semantic treatment of three different manifestations of yě, namely, Additive yě, which is similar to English also, Parametric/Scalar yě, which we find in ‘no matter’ and even/even if contexts, and, finally, Modal yě, basically a concessivity marker. Additive, Parametric/Scalar and Modal yě are different in interpretation and require different licensing conditions. Additive yě can only be licensed if an antecedent can be retrieved from the context: the antecedent must be explicitly asserted or otherwise present in the active context and it must have the same argumentative orientation as the host sentence. Parametric/scalar yě can only be licensed if scalarity is marked in the sentence. Finally, as a concessivity marker, Modal yě presupposes the existence of a concessive proposition as an alternative. Pragmatically, the use of Modal yě results in a polite, indirect, tactful or less absolute reading of the host sentence. The syntactic properties of the different manifestations of yě are explored vis à vis Butler's modal hierarchy and Cinque’s adverb hierarchy. We conclude that there are two positions of yě in the syntactic structure, one in CP and the other in IP.Theoretical and Experimental Linguistic

Topological Spatial Relations, Containment and Support: A Contrastive Study of Mandarin and English.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2017

Proceedings of the 2010 Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft für Semantik

Sinn & Bedeutung - the annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Semantik - aims to bring together both established researchers and new blood working on current issues in natural language semantics, pragmatics, the syntax-semantics interface, the philosophy of language or carrying out psycholinguistic studies related to meaning. Every year, the conference moves to a different location in Europe. The 2010 conference - Sinn & Bedeutung 15 - took place on September 9 - 11 at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, organized by the Department for German Studies

Chinese Sentence-Initial Indefinites: What Corpora Reveal

While the sentence-initial position in Chinese is generally related to givenness/definiteness, instances of informationally new or indefinite sentence-initial nps may be found in language in use. This paper systematically explores the phenomenon of sentence-initial indefinites (SIIs), their statistical relevance, and the interaction with features typically connected to linear order, such as animacy or locatability. Results of a quantitative and qualitative analysis conducted on three major big-size, generalised corpora show that SIIs in Chinese are not only possible, but also statistically relevant. Animacy and locatability are found to play a key role in increasing SIIs acceptability. Finally, data reveal a new pattern featuring SIIs with proper nouns

Defining and Assessing Chinese Syntactic Complexity via TC-Units

Ph.D. University of Hawaii at Manoa 2016.Includes bibliographical references.The triad dimensions of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) has been widely used for assessing second language performance and development. Unlike accuracy and fluency, the construct of Chinese syntactic complexity has not been comprehensibly conceptualized or operationalized. Moreover, not tailored to the typological differences such as the topic prominence of the Chinese language, measures developed globally were found not as valid for Chinese syntactic complexity assessment as they are for Indo- European languages. Research indicated that the mean length of the T-unit of native Chinese speakers is shorter than that of L2 Chinese speakers (Jin, 2006; Yuan, 2009). For situations where research findings developed globally are not as applicable when indiscriminately applied to typologically different languages, this dissertation employed the notion of GlobaLocality to define and assess Chinese syntactic complexity. First, globally, clause combining was revisited to subsume the topic chain in addition to coordination and subordination. An organic approach was then adopted to investigate complexity via global, clausal, and subclausal levels (Norris & Ortega, 2009). Second, locally, a taxonomy of Topic-Comment units (TC-units) was proposed to examine Chinese syntactic complexity: the number and the nature of a terminable TC-unit’s components; and the number and the nature of their constituent relationship. Third, by performing discriminant function analyses on L1 and L2 Chinese speakers’ spoken (N=115) and written (N=116) output elicited from a designed online test, a series of proposed TC-unit based measures were confirmed with high efficiency (61.2%~76.5%) at proficiency group membership classification. Lower-proficiency speakers produced shorter terminable TC-units consisting of fewer single TC-units, whereas higher-proficiency speakers produced longer terminable TC-units in the form of varied topic chains consisting of more single TC-units. Chinese syntactic complexity development along proficiency increase also displayed a transition from more lengthening to more combining of single TC-units. Fourth, utilizing TC-unit based measures, repeated measures analyses observed more complex language produced in more complex tasks along the resource-directing dimension. Immediate task repetition was observed to lower learners’ communication anxiety and improve learners’ self-perceived performance. Last, this dissertation provided suggestions on complexity descriptions for proficiency guidelines and on how to develop Chinese syntactic complexity in classroom instruction