Chinese as a Second Language. The journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, USA - Volume 51, Issue 2, 2016

Previous research in Chinese character learning strategies has shown that students tend to rely on the mechanical copying and mindless memorization of characters, especially before they acquire enough characters to allow them to use the knowledge of Chinese radicals effectively. The aim of this study is to describe actual mnemonic methods and learning strategies used by first-year Chinese language students. For a period of one semester, 50 Czech university students were asked to keep records of mnemonics used to memorize individual characters. Qualitative data analysis reveals the types of strategies they applied. Strategy content analysis has identified ten frequently-used basic strategies, including Story, Radical, Imagination, Component Comparison, Word, Similarity, Drawing, Emotion, Etymology, and Pronunciation. These strategies are used either independently to elaborate a single piece of information, or in combinations, interweaving two or more pieces of information into one. Strategies show the students’ tendency to analyze characters into components, name individual components, and focus on graphic and semantic information, while omitting the phonological information.

Guided by Shulman’s (1987) concept of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), this study investigates pre-service and new Chinese language teachers’ instructional contexts, their PCK, and their challenges in teaching Chinese to students with disabilities in public K-12 schools in two Midwestern states in the United States. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected from a survey. The study finds that Chinese language teachers are teaching in very complicated and difficult contexts for students with disabilities, and they are facing tremendous challenges, which may have contributed to their lack of PCK and seriously undermined their confidence and instruction as well. Therefore, more assistance and support are needed for public K-12 Chinese teachers in the U.S. inclusive classroom to promote more sustained development of Chinese education. Since there has been little research on this aspect of K-12 Chinese education in the United States, this study may help prompt more discussion on the topic in our field.

Two problems often emerge in the process of learning Chinese. First, learning to write at the beginning stage often focuses on forms, without an authentic purpose. As a result, learners do not have enough motivation to write. Second, while extensive reading benefits language learners, not many extensive reading materials are available to beginning and lower-intermediate level CFL learners. This empirical study examined the feasibility of incorporating a writing project into the curriculum, as well as the potential impact of such a project on learners’ reading and writing progress. A total of 89 learners participated in this study. The findings show that the participants who wrote books and those who read the books both enjoyed and benefited from the project.

Pragmatic competence, the ability to conduct socially appropriate communication, plays an important role in influencing the success of business communication. This study examined the availability of explicit pragmatics information and related exercises in eight Business Chinese (BC) textbooks used in the U.S. institutions of higher education. The quantitative and qualitative findings showed that only a few textbooks explicitly listed pragmatics as a learning objective. Meanwhile, while explicit pragmatics information was provided in the BC textbooks, substantial variations were found across different subcategories of pragmatic features as well as across textbooks; moreover, the quantity of explicit pragmatics information and the ways of presenting and practicing various pragmatic features, as afforded by these textbooks, may not allow full-fledged development of pragmatic competence among learners.