Mobile Experience in Teaching Chinese Pinyin

In New Zealand, for non-Chinese speaker learners aged 5-12, the Chinese courses provided by the Confucius Institute are usually based on the premise of increasing interest, with the main teaching goal of improving students' oral communication skills and increasing their understanding of Chinese and Asian culture. Therefore, it is an effective way to improve the quality of Chinese teaching by fully considering the students' cultural background and combining modern teaching techniques with traditional teaching content. Guided by N.S. Prabhu's task-based language teaching methods, this chapter uses a case study method to explore how to use the mobile applications and other multimedia technologies to improve the teaching effect of Chinese Pinyin in a New Zealand elementary school.

Mobile Technologies in Learning the Chinese Language for Students of Non-Linguistic Courses

The methodological potential of mobile technologies in teaching Chinese language to students of non-linguistic areas of training is considered. The author defines the term “mobile learning,” offers a list of mobile technologies that can be used in teaching Chinese language, and develops a nomenclature of speech and language skills formed by students of non-linguistic training areas based on mobile technologies. The author demonstrated the advantages of using mobile phones in learning Chinese language as a second language. The areas of mobile language-based learning discussed in this research are vocabulary, listening, grammar, phonetics, and reading comprehension.

Optimal Use of L1 and L2 in Teaching Chinese to Sri Lankan Students: Approaches and Challenges

Traditional perspectives on monolingual education and total immersion have been substituted by more novel approaches to multilingual education such as translanguaging and partial immersion where the learners’ language repertoire is paid adequate respect. The present study investigates the role of L1 and L2 in teaching Chinese in Sri Lanka using 42 adult Chinese language learners in Sri Lanka as informants and a structured questionnaire was used as the main data collection tool. The informants have a highly divided perspective towards the use of L1 and L2 in the classroom. Most students have favored English instruction considering its efficacy in career prospects and Sinhala for convenience of comprehension. Considering the existing situation of Chinese language textbooks, language policy, and recent trends in multilingualism in Sri Lanka, total immersion is less likely to bring optimal effectiveness in teaching Chinese. The present study suggests that partial immersion and translanguaging would be more constructive for Sri Lankan students if cautiously handled with less hindrance to the delivery of target language content and its accuracy. A multilingual approach would, on one hand, offer a safe space for students to communicate while penetrating cross-cultural barriers through cultivation of culture-sensitivity.

Questioning North Korea’s digraphic inflection point: Kim Il Sung’s 1964 and 1966 conversations with linguists reconsidered

Kim Il Sung’s 1964 and 1966 conversations with linguists are appropriately deemed important as the establishment of the North’s “cultured language” as a standard, as well as guidance related to language purification and script. In the analysis of inflection point related to language planning and policy in the North, is the often guidance on re-enshrinement of teaching “Chinese characters” (hanja) in North Korean education. Clearly this was official pronouncement of functional, synchronic digraphia, which has been preserved and operationalized down to the present. Scholarship on these conversations, amounting to policy guidance, attribute the shift in policy related to script as an inflection point. The author of this article concurs with its importance, but with respect to digraphia in the North, the conversations related to hanja instruction served as a confirmation for what was a broad trend in North Korean language planning during the years 1953-1964, a language planning and policy fait accompli, diminishing the portrayal of the conversations as a digraphic inflection point in North Korea.

Between Sound and Voice: Teaching Chinese Tones To Non-Tonal Language Speakers

The production of highly intelligible syllables in Mandarin Chinese entails a successful production of tones, which poses a challenge for learners of Chinese as a foreign language. The aim of the current paper is to address this issue by identifying the key tonal features contributing to tone intelligibility in the lexemes produced by Polish learners of Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language. Samples of Polish female students’ tonal pronunciations at two stages of learning were selected and compared with productions made by a female native speaker of Mandarin Chinese from Taiwan. Four syllables produced by the students were selected from a corpus of read-out passages which had already been assessed for the intelligibility of monosyllabic lexemes by native judges. The students’ pronunciation samples (whose pronunciation improved from the A1 minus language level to A2) were analysed using pitch, fundamental frequency contour, and register span criteria, and then compared to the female native speaker’s pronunciations of the same syllables. Importantly, before the results of this analysis are presented, the simplified model of tones widely used in language instruction is compared and contrasted with the acoustic analysis of tonal productions made by the native speaker. This is done to show to what extent the simplified, widely used model reflects real-life tonal productions.

Nationally oriented automotive marketing in China

  This article examines the specificity of formation of nationally oriented automotive marketing in China. The object of this research is the Chinese nationally oriented automotive marketing, while the subject is verbal and nonverbal means of its creation. Special attention is given to the analysis of the techniques of creating texts for nationally oriented automobile advertising in the Chinese language, in which multimodal means are used for the development of a positive image of the country and impact upon the domestic audience. The goal lies in determination of the specific features of multimodal media characteristic for such type of advertising. The article employs the methods of lexical-semantic and contextual analysis to reveal the linguopragmatic potentials of the text; method of linguoculturological commentary to describe the ethnocultural specificity; method of multimodal discourse analysis to examine the interaction of semiotic complexes in advertising The scientific novelty consists in studying the nationally oriented marketing strategies from the perspective of the theory of multimodality, which requires the analysis of semiotic heterogeneous codes in the advertising text. It is proven that the specificity of multimodal complex in the texts of Chinese nationally oriented automobile marketing manifests on the level of verbal and nonverbal means used therein. This is substantiated by the unique cultural-historical and social factors, as well as the peculiarities of the Chinese linguistic system. The acquired results may find practical implementation in teaching Chinese language, as well as in research on marketing linguistics.  

Importance and Problems of Oral Teaching in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language

This study reviews the importance of oral teaching in teaching Chinese as a foreign language. The oral teaching of the primary stage of Chinese as a foreign language has different characteristics and properties from other languages and other stages of learning in terms of the nature of the subject and the stage of learning. The main goal of oral teaching is to improve students’ oral communication skills. The training of second language teaching skills is generally divided into listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation. The purpose of language teaching is to cultivate students’ ability to communicate in the language they have learned. This study introduces the problems that should be paid attention to in the primary stage of oral teaching, which is helpful in teaching oral Chinese as a foreign language. Teaching Chinese as a foreign language should take the cultivation of learners’ language communication skills as the main goal, which has become a consensus among people. Among the many courses of Chinese as a foreign language, oral course can be regarded as the most flexible and directly related to the actual communicative ability of the training language. Speaking class provides students with speaking opportunities, such that students can master spoken words, spoken grammar and spoken expression patterns; fully mobilise the language information accumulated in the brain memory bank for communication; and move up from language learning as soon as possible The ‘plateau area’ in China is a problem that teachers of oral English classes need to explore. This study aims to improve the effect of oral Chinese teaching in the primary stage of teaching as a foreign language and achieve the expected teaching goals. This study also discusses this issue from the principles of specific teaching implementation.

A Study of Cultural Elements in High Level Chinese Language Textbooks for Primary National School

This study examines the cultural elements in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language (TCSL) based on six high-level of National Primary School’s Chinese Language (BCSK) textbooks, which are textbooks of BCSK KBSR (Primary School Integrated Curriculum) Standard four to Standard six and textbooks of BCSK KSSR (Primary School Standard Curriculum) Standard four to Standard six in order to investigate the changes of cultural elements content and describe the features of cultural elements in this two sets of high-level BCSK textbooks. Researcher has used library research methods and information technology methods to collect data and then use quantitative and qualitative analysis methods to calculate cultural elements in high-level BCSK textbooks by referenced to the criteria of classification of cultural elements which designed by researcher based on previous studies as well as the references of TCSL experts. The results showed that (1) high level BCSK KSSR textbooks are found that had more cultural elements for the total number of 622 compared to 522 in high-level BCSK KBSR textbook with the increasing of 19.16% and (2) high-level BCSK KSSR textbooks can be said to be more ideal to fostering communicative competence as the cultural elements in this set of BCSK textbooks are more geared towards communicative cultural elements with a record rate of 46.30% compared to 39.27% only in high-level BCSK KBSR textbooks.