Chinese Archive

Results in BLC Posts

UC Berkeley Online Chinese Placement Test: Improvements, Implementations, and Impediments

The original version of the Chinese placement test at Berkeley was developed ten years ago. With the rapid advancement of web technology as well as instructional changes in the Chinese curriculum, our placement test needed an update. This presentation will describe the process we went through in redesigning the test, including the incorporation of demographic…

BLC Travel Grant Report

I gave a lecture presentation on a project I co-authored with Kazuya Saito at the 166th Acoustical Society of America (ASA) on December 4, 2013. I have been presenting my work at the ASA since the 156th conference in Miami. The ASA is an international scientific society dedicated to promoting research on acoustics and its…

BLC Travel Grant Report

This past December, I participated in The 2012 International Conference of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language Conference. In this conference, there were several topics covered. The ones that stood out exceptionally were: Teaching Methodology, Language Analysis, Research, and Material and Grammatical Analysis and Presentation. I found these topics to be very helpful to my…

BLC Travel Grant Report

Thanks to the BLC and its generous travel grant, I was able to attend the 2012 Chinese Language Teachers Association Conference held in Philadelphia. During the three-day conference, hundreds of Chinese language teachers shared their research results and different views of how to teach Chinese effectively. I was honored to have the opportunity to share…

Lecture by Madeline Spring, May 1, 2006

Berkeley Language Center Spring 2006 Lecture Series The K-16 Chinese Flagship Program: A Model for the Future by Madeline Spring, UO Chinese Flagship K-16 Academic Director, Center for Applied Second Language Studies, University of Oregon, Eugene OR The Center for Applied Second Language Studies (CASLS) at the University of Oregon and the Portland Public School…

Results in L2 Journal Articles

The Effects of L2 Proficiency on Pragmatics Instruction: A Web-Based Approach to Teaching Chinese Expressions of Gratitude

This study investigated whether the effects of pragmatics instruction delivered via a self-access website in a Chinese as a foreign language learning environment vary according to learners’ language proficiency. The website provided learners with explicit instruction in how to express gratitude appropriately in Chinese and offered them pragmatic consciousness-raising activities for practice. Two groups of learners who differed in Chinese proficiency received ...

A Transdisciplinary Approach to Examining and Confidence-Boosting the Experiences of Chinese Teachers of Chinese in Finland

With the current rise of China as a political, cultural, and economic superpower, Chinese as a foreign and second language has gained popularity worldwide. Finland is also responding to this global wave, as is reflected by the increasing number of Chinese courses in formal and informal settings in the Nordic country. Yet not all actors involved in the promotion of Chinese seem to experience instruction in the language in the same way. This study investigates how Chinese teachers of the Chinese language, who represent the majority of the ‘workforce’ for instruction in this language in Finland, perceive Chinese language education and their role in it...

Politicizing Study Abroad: Learning Arabic in Egypt and Mandarin in China

This paper examines ideologies of American study abroad in politically and culturally “non-Western” countries. Drawing from the theory of orientalism (Said, 1978), we analyze how American public discourse on study abroad for learners of Mandarin and Arabic manifests an orientalist thinking, and how such macro discourse both produces multilingual subjects (Kramsch, 2010) and considerable tensions with the micro discourses of these subjects. Our findings show ...

Teaching Chinese Cultural Perspectives through Film

Teaching Chinese cultural perspectives in CFL instruction is more challenging than teaching about Chinese cultural products and behavior. It is challenging because most textbooks do not orient their approach to it, because native-Chinese-speaking teachers tend to overlook it as it is so much a part of them that ...

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