Australian Review of Applied Linguistics. Supplement Series - Volume 12, Issue 1, 1995

This paper outlines the principal features which characterise secondary level student exchange programs with Japan, especially those relating to the home and school settings. Some of the main outcomes and gains from student exchanges, specifically, socio-psychological gains, cultural enrichment and gains in communicative competence are briefly described. The data are drawn from various sources, but principally from oral interviews in Japanese with a sample of 19 former exchange students, background interviews in English with some of these students, and a large national survey completed by 566 returned exchange students. All the evidence suggests that outstanding gains are derived from an exchange experience. With regard to communication, the exchange students make rapid progress with listening and speaking Japanese, even if some linguistic or sociolinguistic features are not acquired or are not acquired properly. As in-country experience for secondary or tertiary students constitutes a vital part of a LOTE program, more in-depth research in this area is recommended.

This study aims to investigate the effects of in-country experience on oral communication skills in Japanese. Do students who have had in-country experience in Japan have a higher level of proficiency in any area of oral communication skills than those who have not? To what extent do students with in-country experience differ from those without in their acquisition of various areas of oral communication skills? The performance of subjects in the mid-year oral examination were used as data for this study and comparisons were made between those with and without in-country experience. We believe that linguistic competence alone is not sufficient for successful communication. The results of this study provide tentative evidence that in-country experience did have positive effects on the acquisition of oral communication skills. However, the relationship between the acquisition of more than one speech style and sociolinguistic competence also emerged as a complex issue.

In the reality of learner diversity and large enrolment, how can we effectively deliver a foreign language curriculum that is learner-centred and communicatively-based, and that fosters learner autonomy? This paper proposes a curriculum innovation in which a curriculum holds two major components: one of self-directed learning project and the other of any syllabus type of one’s choice. The paper describes and discusses a case study, which is a trial of the proposed curriculum, then further makes recommendations for successful implementation of such a curriculum. The project section of the proposed curriculum has four stages: the introduction stage where the concepts and benefit of the project are introduced to learners; the planning stage where the learners draw learning contracts; the monitoring stage where the learners monitor and modify their learning; and the assessment stage where the learners assess their own performance in accordance with their learning contracts.

The teaching of Mandarin Chinese can be enhanced by the application of principles underlying the Chinese way of thinking -the Conceptual Sequence Principle (CSP) (Wu 1992:53) and the Principle of Temporal Sequence (PTS) (Tai 1985:61). These are fundamental principles motivating syntactic structures and discourse organisations in Chinese. The two principles capture the most general tendency of Chinese syntactic structures and discourse organisation. CSP accounts for various double (or multiple) nominative constructions typical of the language including Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) and Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) patterns, whereas PTS explains the relative position of verbs in verb compounds and serial verb constructions, and the position of adverbials – typically those of time and location – in relation to the verb in a sentence, as well as the because-therefore discourse pattern (Kirkpatrick 1991:183). An understanding of the two principles will not only enable students to gain insight into the Chinese language and avoid common mistakes caused by the interference of their mother tongue, but also assist them to understand the Chinese way of thinking and achieve interactive competence in the language.

The importance of understanding target cultures is an increasingly acknowledged aspect in the teaching of Asian languages. Yet how to incorporate the teaching of cultures with languages remains controversial. This paper will discuss a number of main paradigms of teaching target culture employed in Asian language programs and propose a concept of capacity which relates target cultures with the language learners’ own culture.

This paper compares the strategies used by a group of English native speakers to develop competence in Japanese, a non-cognate language, and in a more familiar language, French. The participants were undergraduate students enrolled in both French and Japanese language courses. A verbal report procedure, the yoked subject technique, was used to gather data on strategy use by learners as they worked with target language materials. The data was analysed according to four dimensions of strategy use: metacognitive, cognitive, social and affective. The results indicated that the cognitive strategies learners used when learning Japanese diverged from those they used for learning French. The learning of Japanese was characterised by the use of repetition, writing out, and translation, with limited use of resourcing and no elaboration or inferencing strategies. The discussion of the results addresses the issue of the impact of language teaching methodology on cognitive strategy use, the effects of which cannot be readily separated from those of the structure of the target language.

For the majority of Australian students learning Korean the intervocalically placed Korean liquid consonant is one of the most persistent and prevailing pronunciation problems. An auditory phonetic analysis of the spoken data produced by Australian students learning Korean indicates that the pronunciation problem is most likely to be caused by L1 transfer, the sub-phonemic nature of the Korean flapping rule together with the morphophonemic and syllable based characteristics of the Korean orthography. Current teaching practice and students’ learning strategy may also play a crucial role in the non-learning of the pronunciation of the intervoalically placed Korean liquid consonant.

This article examines neologisms coined in Modern Standard Chinese since 1978, and particularly since the mid 1980’s. The neologisms discussed were collected during recent fieldwork in Beijing: through spoken interviews, from the media, and from recent secondary sources. The article focuses on three main strategies that can be used to handle neologisms in teaching and learning Modern Standard Chinese: analysing the methods whereby recent neologisms have been formed; identifying the most common initial and concluding elements in recent neologisms; and considering the various ways in which neologisms are nowadays signalled within texts.

The developing of listening skills is one of the main problem areas of learning to speak Chinese. Beginning students are often baffled by Chinese words which they consider to be homophones, or by words differing only in tones. They need to be convinced that these problems inherent in learning the Chinese language can be overcome if they develop strategies to listen for structures meaning. Since Krashen (1980) pioneered the concept of Comprehensible Input, language teachers have tried to produce listening materials to simulate situations for students to practise authentic language. Some of these teachers include ESL teachers such as Penny Ur, Mary Underwood and Jack Richards. They have produced teachers’ resource books and conducted research on methodological issues. I have been a member of a team of teachers from the University of New South Wales who have undertaken to produce listening packages using authentic-like materials. One of the outcomes of this project is the production of Listening to Mandarin. This paper gives some examples of the strategies used and discusses problems in the teaching of listening comprehension in Mandarin.

Chinese language teaching in Australia is characterised by the communicative approach emphasising interactive activities like role-plays. However, we observed that communicative learning is not always practised to the desired extent. Based on Strauss and Corbin’s (1990) grounded theory model of qualitative research methodology, an investigation involving seventeen upper level students at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) was undertaken to identify obstacles impeding communicative learning. One of the major problems identified in the present study is the use of multiple instructions by some Chinese language instructors and Chinese text-books which contradicts the philosophy of communicative teaching. The themes arising from the data analysis formed the frame of the present article which discusses types of problem instructions, their effects on students trying to complete communicative activities and students’ management of them. The study concludes with a suggestion that multiple instructions be improved in structure and delivery mode in order to make language learning more achievable.

Vocabulary learning is an aspect of language learning. However, in language classrooms vocabulary teaching can be practiced in different ways in different contexts. This paper first describes and compares vocabulary teaching at BUAA (the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics) and CUT (Curtin University of Technology) in Australia and then examines the causes of the methodological differences found in vocabulary teaching in these two educational institutions. In these two universities, methodological differences exist in vocabulary teaching at the levels of both formal instruction and classroom interaction. In the formal instruction of vocabulary teaching, these two universities exhibit different characteristics at the presentation, repetition and exploitation stages. The contrast between foreign and second language teaching, the cultural and educational contexts in which the target language is taught, the way in which the learners’ first language is learned, the linguistic distance between the learner’s native and target languages, and learner and teacher characteristics cause to a greater or lesser extent the methodological differences observed in vocabulary teaching in the two universities in question.