China’s growing economic power has led to over one hundred million people speaking Chinese world-wide (Chai & Wang, 2017). Although the Chinese language may not replace English as the most popular language worldwide, it is acknowledged that the Chinese language is an indispensable part of the future world (Zhao & Huang, 2010). However, there appears to be a paucity of research into the role self-efficacy and establishing good habits as a language learner play in non-native speaking students experiencing success while learning Chinese. A phenomenological study was conducted to investigate college students who were early Chinese learners in a beginning level preparatory course of a non-academic long-term Chinese language program, their experiences of learning Chinese, and the association, if any, between students’ self-efficacy as learners of Chinese and their demonstration of characteristics of Good Language Learners (GLLs). Data were collected from a survey, questionnaires, and one-on-one interviews. Six research findings were generated from research data and based on early Chinese learners, referred to students in the findings. Research findings from this study are listed as followed. Research Finding 1: Students’ perceptions of their strengths in learning Chinese are the strengths related to language aspects and personality traits. Research Finding 2: Students’ perceptions of their challenges in learning Chinese are language-related challenges, challenges from the teachers, challenges from the curriculum setting, and challenges from the class members. Research Finding 3: Students have at least five characteristics of GLLs (Edge & Garton, 2009) which are Characteristics 1, 2, 3, 6, and 7 and partial of Characteristics 8 and 10. More specifically, early Chinese learners have a positive attitude toward Chinese and Chinese speakers (Characteristic 1). They have strong motivations to learn Chinese (Characteristic 2). They are confident in becoming successful learners (Characteristic 3). They actively organize Chinese practices (Characteristic 6). They have ways to express themselves correctly (Characteristic 7). They are willing to engage in Chinese-speaking situations (partial of Characteristic 8). They use strategies to learn Chinese (partial of Characteristic 10). Research Finding 4: Students tend to have Characteristics 4 and 5 and partial of Characteristic 10. To be more specific, early Chinese learners tend to have their minds prepared for making mistakes when using Chinese and to learn from the mistakes (Characteristics 4). They tend to like learning Chinese (Characteristics 5). And they tend to try out new strategies while learning Chinese (partial of Characteristic 10). Research Finding 5: Students lack Characteristic 9 and partial of Characteristic 8. To be more specific, early Chinese learners are not used to working directly in Chinese (Characteristic 9). They are neither ready to use Chinese as frequently as their native languages (partial of Characteristic 8). Research Finding 6: There is no obvious association between students’ efficacy and their demonstration of characteristics of GLLs (Edge & Garton, 2009) while learning Chinese. This study investigated college students who were early Chinese learners in a beginning level preparatory course of a non-academic long-term Chinese language program, their experiences of learning Chinese, and the association, if any, between students’ self-efficacy as learners of Chinese and their demonstration of characteristics of Good Language Learners (GLLs). This study offered recommendations for teachers, administrators, and policy makers, in non-academic long-term Chinese language programs and in the field of teaching Chinese as a foreign language. Last but not least, recommendations for further research were provided for researchers in the field of teaching Chinese as a foreign language.

5 ABSTRACT The present paper deals with the development of reading skills of adult learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) in Czech language schools and its support provided by three different Chinese language course books. Even though there are various Chinese language course books available on the market, the attention these pay to reading comprehension and its development, is still rather limited. The present master thesis proposes classroom techniques which might be used to address this problem during CFL lessons. The first chapter presents findings and recommendations based on research into the development of foreign language reading skills in general, which are, in the second chapter, subsequently followed by a summary of research findings focusing specifically on teaching reading in CFL. The demands on course books raised by researchers in both fields are then applied to reading texts and accompanying exercises included in three pre-intermediate level CFL course books, New Practical Chinese Reader (Liu et al., 2002), Boya Chinese (Lǐ et al., 2005) and Discover China (Qi et al., 2010). The outcome of the the thesis consists of 21 designed lesson plans which propose solutions to some of the issues raised in the theoretical part of the thesis. The lesson plans indicate how course book texts...

First outlined by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) continues to thrive (e.g. Lakoff&Johnson 1992, Lakoff, 1993, 1999, 2008), by first challenging the traditional view on metaphor as a matter of language and something extraordinary and poetic. CMT claims that metaphor is pervasive and essential in language and thought. Furthermore, metaphor is considered as the locus for abstract reasoning in this theory.Since its proposal, CMT has triggered plethoric research. However, few empirical studies have examined metaphors in second language (L2) acquisition and the importance of metaphor has not been fully recognized as an indispensable dimension in second language teaching and learning (Littlemore, 2009; Littlemore&Low, 2006b). However, metaphors present a hurdle for L2 learners (Danesi, 1992); L2 learners misinterpret metaphors for cultural reasons (Littlemore, 2003); teaching conceptual metaphor as a learning strategy facilitate language learning (Littlemore&Low, 2006a; Li, 2009).Thus, the current study investigates metaphor in learner language in light of CMT via a corpus-based approach. The study particularly examines how L2 learners of Chinese and English express vertical spatial metaphors in L2 English and L2 Chinese writings and how they differ from learners' target languages and learners' native languages.The findings reveal that L2 language development is a dynamic process and four key factors are found to interplay in learners' acquisition of conceptual metaphors: frequency of the metaphor, L2 proficiency, topic familiarity, and linguistic factors. In particular, the frequency of the metaphor as reflected in the target language has the most important impact on learners' acquisition of conceptual metaphors, overriding the factor whether a metaphor is shared in L1 and L2 or not; secondly, L2 proficiency influences how learners are affected by their first languages: learners with lower proficiency are more affected; thirdly, learners acquire the metaphors associated with a familiar topic; finally, L2 learners are constrained by the main semantic unit in the metaphorical expressions. Overall, the study demonstrates that figurative language development is a dynamic process: learners' metaphoric competence demonstrates a developmental pattern, in particular, a pendulum effect and it eventually emerges over L2 proficiency.

This dissertation is a qualitative case study exploring the process of culture learning in a Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) classroom. Guided by a socioculturally based theoretical perspective and adopting the stance of the National Standards, which says that language students "cannot truly master the language until they have also mastered the cultural contexts in which the language occurs" (1996, p. 27), this study describes how culture learning is tied to class practices aimed at developing students' language proficiency by exploring how culture and language are integrated in spoken discourse and interactions in the classroom. The research questions of the study focus on both the instructor's and the students' perspectives towards the interrelationship between language learning and culture learning and their actual practices in the dynamic, complex, and emerging speech community of classroom contexts. Through analysis of student questionnaires, classroom observations, instructor interview, and stimulated-recall sessions with students, this study examines the contexts of culture learning, illustrates how language classroom contexts shape and are shaped by all the class members, including both the instructor and the students, and describes how the classroom spoken discourse in the current advanced-level undergraduate CFL course provides opportunities for culture learning and how culture learning actually happens in this language classroom. The findings suggest that as the instructor and the students interact in the language classroom, it is not so much the particular pieces of cultural and linguistic information under discussion that delineate the actual culture learning process, but rather the active exchanges and sometimes disagreements between the instructor and the students that provide opportunities for interactive cultural dialogues and discussions. In other words, cultural knowledge and understanding are situated in actual contexts of language use. Language learning is also embedded in the same interactive and collaborative discussion of texts. By exploring the complexity of the culture learning process in the language classroom setting, this study adds theoretical and pedagogical support to the premise that culture learning should be an integral part of language instruction at different levels throughout the language curriculum.

With Facebook widely embraced by college students, exploring its educational uses has piqued both educators' and researchers' interest (Mills, 2011; Reinhardt & Zander, 2011; Thorne, 2011). Drawing on a functional perspective of language use, this study explored what kind of language functions intermediate-level Chinese language learners performed when they conducted social communication in Chinese on Facebook and whether conducting weekly social communication in Chinese on Facebook impacted their writing ability. A mixed methods design was adopted. A qualitative approach addressed discourse functions of student communication on Facebook. The qualitative data were mainly collected from nine students' Facebook posts during one semester. A quasi-experimental design was employed to examine whether there was any difference in the quantity and quality of the written texts produced by two groups (N=18) of intermediate-level Chinese language learners. Over the semester, students in the experimental (E) group wrote weekly comments and updates in Chinese on the designated Facebook group page, while students in the control (C) group did not post on the Facebook page. Three writing tasks were administered at the beginning, middle, and end of the semester. These tasks were brief essays which asked students to use Chinese to write about personal information, university life, future plans and goals. Qualitative findings revealed that the participants used 22 types of discourse functions during their social communication on Facebook. The highest percentage of discourse function was asking questions. The next two frequently used discourse functions were expressing opinions and describing events or activities unrelated to campus. Other discourse functions listed among the top 10 were sharing similar experiences or perspectives, expressing likes and dislikes, expressing wishes, making explanations and expressing thanks. When asking questions, the participants mainly used Q-word or Wh- questions and polar questions during their communication and interaction. Alternative questions were seldom used. With regard to question functions, findings revealed that more than half of all the questions were asked to request information. Rhetorical questions were the least and rarely used. In addition, more than half of the total questions were not responded to. All these findings demonstrated that Facebook provided the students with an optional platform to practice situational and functional use of the target language. Quantitative results revealed that there was a significant difference in writing quantity (i.e. the number of Chinese characters produced) between the two groups. While there was no significant difference between the two groups in the first writing task, the E group produced significantly more Chinese characters than the C group in the later writing tasks. In terms of the writing quality, results indicated that both groups showed an improvement from the first to the final task, but no significant differences were found between the two groups in all three writing tasks. In view that the small sample size might have some impact on the outcome of the participants' writing quality, the results are somewhat more promising in the area of quantity.

The study, using a within-group design with eighteen adult high-beginner Chinese L2 learners, investigated the effects of peer review and co-writing on writing in Chinese-as-a-foreign language. Three writing conditions (peer review, co-writing, and individual writing) and three narrative writing topics were counterbalanced for the collection of data, including forty-five writing products, seventy-two questionnaires, videorecorded screen activities and interactions. The research has three main aims: (a) to investigate the effects of peer review and co-writing on writing with respect to fluency, complexity, and accuracy, (b) to explore the nature of verbal interactions during peer review and co-writing, and (c) to investigate students’ perceptions of the three writing activities. With regard to writing performance, the research found no statistically significant differences in measures of fluency and complexity. However, peer review and co-writing resulted in significantly more accurate writing than individual writing, but no difference was observed in the two collaborative writing activities. The analysis of verbal interactions indicated that (1) there were significantly more on-task episodes in peer review than in co-writing; (2) there were significantly more language-related episodes (LREs) and content-related episodes in peer review than in co-writing, while there were significantly more idea-related episodes and text-assessing episodes in co-writing than in peer review; (3) students paid significantly more attention to LRE-lexis and LRE-grammar in peer review than in co-writing, and the differences were mainly observed in discussions on word meanings, verb forms, word usage, and sentence/phrase meanings; and (4) there were also significantly more spelling episodes in peer review than in co-writing. Concerning students’ perceptions, although students tended to prefer co-writing to peer review and peer review to individual writing, they held competing attitudes toward the three activities and believed each of the three had their own strengths, which could not be replaced by the advantages of the other. The findings suggest that peer review, co-writing, and individual writing play different roles in Chinese L2 learners’ development of writing skills, as measured by a range of linguistic indices and as revealed by students’ evaluations. Thus, they are all important because they direct learners to different aspects of their language development. / Graduate

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<p>Service learning has been proposed as a widespread educational movement that merges academic work with real-life community service activities that encourages students to reflect and think critically about their experiences. As a pedagogical tool for second language acquisition, the greatest benefit of utilizing service learning activities results in the fact that it creates connections to the target language community and provides authentic experiences for target language use. Although service-learning has been extensively implemented into language programs such as Spanish and English as a Second Language (ESL), it is still in its infancy with Chinese second language learners.</p><p><br></p> <p>This dissertation examines the effects and outcomes of service-learning involvement on the advanced Chinese learners towards language acquisition, cultural understanding, and community engagement. The study was conducted in a Midwest university with 30 students from a variety of educational and cultural backgrounds.The data was collected through pre-/post-survey, observation and reflective journals. Findings indicated that the service-learning experiences enhanced and enriched students' Chinese language learning. Additional benefits to the students included increasing their knowledge of Chinese culture and history, developing a higher motivation for community engagement and transformative learning, and forming connections to people and community beyond the classroom. However, differences were also found in students' service-learning experiences and outcomes based on gender, race, and cultural backgrounds. Future directions of Chinese service-learning in the emerging fields were discussed as promising avenues for future Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) research and practice.</p>

La question abordée dans cette thèse est l’accès à la lecture autonome des apprenants de chinois langue étrangère. Pour un apprenant de langue maternelle à écriture alphabétique, le chinois est “une langue distante géographiquement, culturellement et linguistiquement” (Bellassen, 2014). Il nous a donc paru nécessaire d’examiner dans quelles conditions s’effectue cet accès, et de définir à cette occasion un “Seuil de Caractères pour Accéder à la Lecture en Autonomie” (SCALA). La présente recherche est fondée sur une enquête réalisée auprès d’un panel d’environ 300 apprenants, dont nous avons cherché à établir la biographie langagière, afin de constituer un corpus de textes authentiques lus en premier. L’analyse de ce matériau permet de mieux comprendre comment un non-lecteur devient un lecteur autonome. Ce travail ouvre en outre des perspectives pédagogiques qui ne demandent qu’à être approfondies. / The subject addressed in this research concerns access to independent reading for the learners of Chinese as a foreign language. For a learner who is a native user of alphabetical writing systems, Chinese is a “geographically, culturally and linguistically distant language” (Bellassen, 2014). Therefore, it seemed necessary to explore under which conditions a learner starts independent reading and to establish a “Threshold of characters to Access First Readings in Autonomy” (TAFRA). This study is based on an investigation conducted with a study sample consisting of over 300 learners with whom we try to establish a language biography as well as to constitute a corpus of authentic first-read texts. The analysis of this material allows to better understand how a non-reader becomes an independent reader and to establish the “TAFRA” list. This study provides interesting insight into future learning as well as pedagogy.