Xiaoping Gao

The interface of linguistic difficulty and task type on the use of the Chinese ba construction by L2 learners

Abstract This study investigates the effects of linguistic difficulty and task type on the use of Chinese ba construction by second language learners. One hundred and ten adult learners completed four tasks orally (i.e., an oral production task prompted by video clips, an oral imitation task, a grammaticality judgement task and a correction task), as well as a background questionnaire and a one-on-one post-task interview. Twenty-two native speakers of Chinese served as baseline. Results demonstrate that the variable type of the Chinese ba construction which is subject to functional constraints is harder to learn than the obligatory type which is subject to obligatory syntactic constraints, and that the oral tasks were more challenging to perform than the metalinguistic tasks. The findings suggest that a series of factors including functional value and discourse context contribute to the linguistic difficulty of Chinese grammar features. The processing constraints of completing tasks and their interaction with linguistic characteristics explain the learning difficulty of the two types of the ba construction.

Constraints preventing Chinese EFL teachers from putting their stated beliefs into teaching practice

ABSTRACT In China, developing students’ overall communicative competence was set as the central goal of the current college English curriculum requirements since 2004. However, this goal has remained largely unfulfilled, particularly with regard to writing competence. This study proposes that the genre-based pedagogy in systemic functional linguistics may be the key to achieve this national curriculum goal. After teachers were trained in this pedagogy, through designed workshops for teacher development, this research examined possible changes in teachers’ stated beliefs about effective writing pedagogy and actual teaching practices. The findings from classroom observations and teachers’ self-reports suggest that even though all teacher participants valued the genre-based pedagogy, a very weak connection was made to their actual teaching practice. This study aimed to understand possible constraints leading to this inconsistency. Teachers’ prior instructional knowledge, general attitudes to educational changes, self-confidence, and contextual factors such as class size, knowledge of students and assessment, were the main contributors to inconsistency. To overcome barriers and maximize the effectiveness of the genre-based pedagogy in achieving the national curriculum goal, several implications are discussed.

Internet literature in China

Online literature or web-based writing (including fiction, poetry, prose and blog posts) has proliferated in popularity with the advancements of internet technologies since the 1990s. According to ...