Teaching and Learning Chinese in Higher Education

Theoretical and Practical Issues

Yang Lu, Yang Lu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315520797
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Langues

Teaching and Learning Chinese in Higher Education deals with the current issues and challenges faced by teachers and learners of Chinese.

Written by leading professionals and academics, the book is the first collection of research articles based on data collected in higher education institutions in the UK. The studies focus on concerns related to learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) and aim to establish studies on teaching Chinese as a foreign language (TCFL) as part of the mainstream of applied linguistics

The contributors have applied their theoretical backgrounds in applied linguistics and education to tackle issues such as how to benchmark the Chinese written language with CEFR, how to integrate standardised Chinese proficiency tests with institutional assessments and teaching methodologies.

Teaching and Learning Chinese in Higher Education will be invaluable to professionals, academics and students seeking theoretical frameworks in applied linguistics for TCFL.

Part I
Benchmarking, standardisation and assessment of the Chinese language

1
European benchmarking Chinese language

Defining the competences in the written language

Yang Lu and Lianyi Song

I Introduction

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has been applied and implemented in Europe and beyond as a broad framework not only for European modern languages, but also for languages with non-alphabetic writing systems such as Chinese and Japanese. Its application has thus positively influenced the curriculum development and assessment of foreign-language programmes. However, it has served as a ‘framework of reference’, and does not therefore ‘offer ready-made solutions’. It has been advised that it ‘must always be adapted to the requirements of particular contexts’ (CEFR, Council of Europe, 2015: 1), which suggests that when standardising or benchmarking a particular foreign-language programme or test, CEFR competence descriptors should not be considered as universally applicable without any adjustment for the specific features of individual languages and learning contexts.

As is commonly known, the Chinese language is a non-alphabetic language with a writing system usually termed as logography, similar to Japanese or Arabic. Learners of Chinese as a foreign or second language (CFL), consequently, have very different learning experiences and difficulties from those learning other languages. Therefore, concerns have been raised about adjusting the CEFR standards for the teaching and learning of the Chinese language in European educational settings. There have been concerns that CEFR might not be adequate for nonspecialist Chinese-language programmes in UK higher education (HE) (Li and Zhang, 2009). In the Spanish CFL context, it has been observed that, first, special and specific linguistic terminologies are needed for benchmarking proficiency levels in Chinese. Second, after the same period of study as for the learners of other languages, selecting teaching materials for the CFL learners has been found challenging due to the difficulties faced when they try to achieve the targeted corresponding CEFR levels in Chinese, especially in the written language (Casas-Tost and Rovira-Esteva, 2014).

This chapter will therefore examine how the CEFR competence descriptors have been applied by the European Benchmarking Chinese Language (EBCL, 2010–2012) project, which has been the first to specifically address the particular difficul-ties and issues related to learning the Chinese script when developing A1 and A2 descriptors for receptive and productive writing competencies. The rationale and decisions made by the EBCL project will be discussed in relation to the newly created or expanded competencies based on the CEFR standards. As observed by the authors of this chapter, the project has contributed significantly to the profile of the Chinese language in Europe, and has thereby achieved considerable social and educational impacts. In particular, it is now extremely important to emphasise the project’s achivements due to increasing concerns that the issues and dilemmas faced, dealt with and successfully resolved by the EBCL project have continued to affect CFL practitioners in European educational institutes. Therefore, it has become pressing and necessary to discuss and endorse the contributions of the EBCL project: namely (1) the development of competence descriptors for the role of the Romanised phonetic system, Pinyin; (2) graphemic and orthographic control of Chinese characters in the teaching and learning of written production and (3) the recommended lists of characters and lexical items provided for assessment and developing learning materials.

However, any discussion of the contributions of the EBCL project cannot be separated from the complicated cognitive processes involved in learning Chinese and the perceived difficulties in learning the logographic script. Furthermore, this chapter will also review the relationship between CFL learners’ competences in spoken and written Chinese, and the learners’ perceived learning difficulties. It is believed that such discussions will encourage CFL professionals to re-examine the recurring confusions and dilemmas caused by the present digital technologies for computer input of Chinese characters and the persistent and lingering reluctance to provide learners with opportunities to learn the Chinese script (Guder, 2014). It is time for us to question: why some learners in their second or third year of a Chinese course are still not able to understand the simplest stories in Chinese texts (Diao, 2013); why some textbooks oversimplify reading comprehension tasks which do not correspond to learners’ intellectual capacities (Guder, 2014); and why some are still proposing that beginners should be only taught to type Chinese characters rather than to write them (Allen, 2009; Everson, 2011a).

II Backgrounds

When the EBCL project was launched in 2010, it was faced with the challenge of applying the CEFR proficiency descriptors to benchmark the Chinese language in the European context. One consideration was that the CEFR competence descriptions might not be inclusive enough to embrace the distinctive features of the Chinese language. Additionally, both CFL practitioners and learners have been greatly challenged and felt apprehensive about teaching and learning a language with such a difficult writing system. In retrospect, those concerns were due to a lack of understanding of the difficulties involved, the importance of learning the written language for L2 acquisition in Chinese, and some learners’ perceptions of those seemingly “impossible missions”. In the sections below, the above issues are reviewed and followed by discussions of the existing standardisation for CFL in general and the benchmarking of the Chinese language in the European context.

II.1 Difficulties in and importance of learning written Chinese

DeFrancis’s (1984) claim that it takes four times longer for adult native speakers of English to learn receptive and productive skills in Chinese than in other European languages has been frequently quoted. In line with such assumptions, practices adopted by the Defence Language Institute in the U.S. have taken measures to adapt for such difficulties in their language training programmes (2015) by requiring higher language aptitude scores for those intending to learn Mandarin Chinese; a minimum of 110 as opposed to 95 for those learning French and Spanish. In addition, the CFL learners in some Chinese programmes in UK HE and other adult educational institutes have been provided with one third more or even double the hours of instruction compared to other languages (See Chapter 8 in this volume for further details on extra hours allocated for Chinese courses in some institutions). Such decisions and practices in these specific contexts notably reflect a wide consensus with regard to the added difficulties and time needed to learn the Chinese language, especially for those whose first languages use a phonographic writing system. As a result, many extensive studies have been carried out to explore and verify such assumptions and practice.

Li et al. (2014), for example, after reviewing the neurocognitive approaches necessary to process the Chinese language, conclude that:

In general, Chinese characters, as compared with other orthographic systems such as alphabetic writing systems, place greater cognitive demands on visual-spatial analytic skills, in both cognitive processing and reading acquisition.

(Li et al., 2014: 513)

For instance, when learning a word in Chinese, either a single-character or a two-character word, the pronunciation is usually learned through the Romanised system of Pinyin; the logographical characters consisting of strokes or radicals with certain structures representing the meanings must then be learned, which in most cases contain little or rather unreliable phonetic cues. While Pinyin might be easier to learn, as some of the syllables resemble pronunciation in English or in other alphabetical languages, to memorise the components of a character that may consist of more than 15 strokes, and then to be able to reproduce these from memory in writing is the most challenging task for learners at all levels. This means that reading and writing the Chinese script undoubtedly involves more cognitive processes than developing these skills in alphabetical languages. Learning to read Chinese, according to Seymour (2006), involves the interaction of at least two cognitive systems: the phonological and orthographic systems. The former processes the phonological information of Chinese characters, identifying sounds in order to render the characters into spoken language, while the latter is applied to encode the written form in terms of strokes, radicals and structures so that clues for meanings can be achieved.

The problem, however, is that a Chinese character being read by a CFL learner or a native speaker of Chinese does not usually provide clues to the sound-meaning relations. The strokes and radicals in a character do not always represent its meaning fully or explicitly. As a result, the cognitive workload can be doubled for CFL learners, especially for beginners who do not have sufficient knowledge of characters to decode the unknown characters for reading comprehension. At their level of proficiency, they also need to relate the alphabetical Pinyin with the logographical characters phonologically and the characters with their semantical meanings in context. With respect to writing Chinese characters, the cognitive processes involved have been examined through two basic types of learner errors (Shen, 2013): intra-character-writing when the shape of a character is altered by omitting or adding strokes, and substitution when a targeted character is substituted by another or by a non-character invented by the learner. The first type of error indicates that the learner’s attention is upon the overall configuration of the character but not upon the details, while the second type shows that attention is upon the similarity between characters without recognising the differences, which shows the complex processes for writing Chinese characters by a learner.

Such studies have suggested that for reading and writing characters, metalinguistic awareness, both phonological and orthographic, is important due to the nature of the logographic writing system. As learners encounter greater cognitive constraints when reading and writing in Chinese than in alphabetic languages, their knowledge of their first languages is rarely sufficient to assist their development in the L2. As a result, there has been continuing frustration and reluctance to teach or learn Chinese characters in educational settings, leading Allen (2009) to propose that, in order to save time and effort for all parties involved, handwriting Chinese characters should be replaced by electronic writing for beginner learners. Yet, as Everson (2011a: 267) observes, ‘the idea of abandoning handwriting will most likely be contested among native teachers of Chinese, as the writing of characters is not only viewed by them as useful for communication, but as a gateway into Chinese and much of Asia...