Congratulations to Jun Lang, EALL Chinese Linguistics PhD student, for receiving the CLTA (Chinese Language Teachers Association USA) 2020-2021 Jiede Empirical Research Award for her project titled “Bridging linguistic theories, corpus research, and pedagogical practices in Chinese grammar teaching.” For a description of Jun’s research, see below.

The disconnection between linguistic theories/research and language pedagogy has been widely observed and lamented (Jing-Schmidt 2015; Tao 2016). This project aims to bridge linguistic theories supported by corpus research and pedagogical practices to explore the effects of a usage-based constructionist approach to teaching and learning notoriously challenging constructions (e.g. ba construction) in second language Chinese. A teaching intervention is designed based on corpus findings in Chinese linguistics (Jing-Schmidt et al. 2015; Xu 2014) and will be implemented to an experimental group of L2 Chinese learners. Teaching target constructions to this group will focus on form-meaning mappings, frequency of subtype use, prototypical examples, and real-life language use. My research methods will integrate quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. Quantitative data will be collected from scores of a pre-test and post-test. The data then will be analyzed using statistical significance tests to examine whether there is an effect of the proposed teaching intervention. Qualitative data will be collected from semi-structured interviews.

References

Jing-Schmidt, Z. (2015). The place of linguistics in Chinese second language teaching and teacher training: toward a usage-based constructionist theoretical orientation. Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, 50(3), 1-22.

Jing-Schmidt, Z., X. Peng & J. Chen. (2015). From Corpus Analysis to Grammar Instruction: Toward a usage-based constructionist approach to constructional stratification. Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, 50(2), 109-138.

Tao, H. (2016). Integrating Chinese linguistic research and language teaching and learning: An Introduction. In Tao, Hongyin (Ed.), Integrating Chinese linguistic research and language teaching and learning, xiii-xviii. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Xu, Y. (2014). A corpus-based functional study of shi…de constructions. Chinese Language and Discourse, 5(2), 146-184.