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The Corpus Approach to the Teaching and Learning of Chinese as an L1 and an L2 in Retrospect

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Computational and Corpus Approaches to Chinese Language Learning

Part of the book series: Chinese Language Learning Sciences ((CLLS))

Abstract

The use of corpora in the teaching and learning of Chinese has a history of nearly a century. Pedagogically oriented Chinese corpus studies have originated on a solid methodological footing before computers were available. The creation of concordances and character/word lists, coupled with quantitative analyses of sentence patterns, have offered fascinating insights into Chinese textbook compilation and syllabus design. Such corpus findings have illuminated what lexical items and grammatical patterns should be taught, and in what order vocabulary and grammar points should be presented. Over the last few decades, the craze for Chinese interlanguage corpora has been largely motivated by China’s growing global influence. The lexico-grammatical performance in the spoken and written production of Chinese as a second language (CSL) learners has been systematically investigated. Both corpus-based L1 and L2 Chinese studies have been fairly successful in terms of the description of the Chinese (inter)language, but there is still much room for pedagogical implementation, that is, to transform the research into classroom friendly teaching materials.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    ‘B.C.’ here is Nelson Francis’ play on words, meaning ‘Before Computer’ rather than its literal sense ‘Before Christ’.

  2. 2.

    Issac Pitman’s word frequency list was published in 1843 in The Phonotypic Journal, but the research was done in 1838 (Pitman 1843: 161).

  3. 3.

    Pingmin was defined by the leaders of the Mass Education Movement as illiterates (Tao and Zhu 1923: 43).

  4. 4.

    陶知行 Zhixing Tao was an early alias of the better-known Chinese educationalist 陶行知 Xingzhi Tao. The difference in name says something about the transformation of his philosophy. Influenced by Chinese Confucianist scholar 王阳明 Wang (1472–1529), Tao (1891–1946) took his name Zhixing (meaning knowledge-action) in the 1910s and Xingzhi (meaning action-knowledge) in 1934 (Tao 1934: 286–287). Both names, Zhixing and Xingzhi, showed Tao’s identification with Yangming Wang’s theory of 知行合一 zhi xing he yi ‘unity of knowledge and action’. When Xingzhi was adopted, Tao seemed to prioritise xing (action) over zhi (knowledge), which suggested that knowledge was derived from empirical engagement (Boorman 1970: 243–244; Browning and Bunge 2009: 388).

  5. 5.

    赵淑华 Shaohua Zhao was the lead scholar and director of the Sentence Pattern Research Group at Beijing Language Institute.

  6. 6.

    The term ‘input corpus’ is used by some learner corpus linguists meaning the collection of learners’ language exposures such as teachers’ talk in class as well as the written texts that the learners are confronted with in learning. In this article, input corpora mainly refer to the written texts, textbooks in particular.

  7. 7.

    The corpus is freely available at https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/guangwai-lancaster-chinese-learner-corpus/.

  8. 8.

    http://ncl.xmu.edu.cn/shj/Default.aspx. Chinese textbooks for native Chinese students were also collected alongside the CSL textbook data.

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Acknowledgements

The research was supported in part by the key project of the National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education (MOE Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Universities) (Ref No.: 17JJD740003) at Beijing Foreign Studies University. The author gratefully acknowledges the funding of the Fulbright Visiting Scholar grant during the writing up of the article. The author would also like to thank the referees and editors for their constructive comments, Professor Chengzhi Chu for providing helpful resource of ChineseTA, and Professor Eniko Csomay and Dr. Lu Lu for proofreading the manuscript.

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  1. Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing, China

    Jiajin Xu

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  1. Department of Applied Linguistics, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Xiaofei Lu

  2. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Berlin Chen

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Xu, J. (2019). The Corpus Approach to the Teaching and Learning of Chinese as an L1 and an L2 in Retrospect. In: Lu, X., Chen, B. (eds) Computational and Corpus Approaches to Chinese Language Learning. Chinese Language Learning Sciences. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3570-9_3

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