Perfective -le Use and Consciousness-Raising among Beginner-Level Chinese Learners
Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA
Languages 2020, 5(2), 16; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages5020016
Received: 3 March 2020
/
Revised: 3 April 2020
/
Accepted: 9 April 2020
/
Published: 17 April 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Acquisition of Chinese as a First and Second Language)
Within the framework of explicit learning and consciousness-raising, this study investigates patterns in the use of -le in authentic classroom tasks by beginner-level learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). It also explores the role and the processes of student-centered consciousness-raising in explicit knowledge building. Twenty-five participants completed a grammaticality judgment task, an interactive role-play task, and a written editing task. The experiment group received role-play sheets with explicit forms of -le provided, and participants engaged in rule induction of -le in forbidden context in the role-play session. Results showed that beginner-level learners’ difficulty with -le use manifested in different ways in these tasks, and -le underuse occurred more than overuse in the control group’s oral role-play task. Consciousness-raising through unguided small group rule induction supported participants’ learning of -le usage constraints, shown by differences between the control and experiment groups’ performances in the posttest. Through a qualitative analysis of participants’ analytical talk transcripts, the processes and outcomes of small group rule induction are examined and discussed.
View Full-Text
Keywords:
Chinese as a foreign language; consciousness-raising; obligatory and forbidden contexts; perfective aspect marker; rule induction
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
MDPI and ACS Style
Xu, Y. Perfective -le Use and Consciousness-Raising among Beginner-Level Chinese Learners. Languages 2020, 5, 16. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages5020016
AMA Style
Xu Y. Perfective -le Use and Consciousness-Raising among Beginner-Level Chinese Learners. Languages. 2020; 5(2):16. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages5020016
Chicago/Turabian StyleXu, Yi. 2020. "Perfective -le Use and Consciousness-Raising among Beginner-Level Chinese Learners" Languages 5, no. 2: 16. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages5020016
Find Other Styles
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.
