Learning Chinese: Linguistic, Sociocultural, and Narrative Perspectives by Patricia Duff etal. (review)

This book, Learning Chinese: Linguistic, sociocultural, and narrative perspectives, is the result of a three-year research project of the Centre for Research in Chinese Language and Literacy Education (CRCLLE) at the University of British Columbia. Patricia (Patsy) Duff, co-director of CRCLLE and professor of Language and Literacy Education, together with Anderson, Ilnyckjy, Lester, Wang and Yates, investigated issues in teaching, learning, and use of Chinese from both structural and interpretive perspectives through multiple approaches.

The book is composed of six chapters. The first chapter begins with an overview of the historical and current situations and research in teaching, learning, and using Chinese as an additional language (CAL). It then introduces the research design and procedure, the multiple research methodologies and perspectives, and the organization of the whole book. Drawing on the personal Chinese learning experiences of five Anglo-Canadians who are also five out of the six authors of this book—except Wang who is a native speaker of Chinese and the coordinator of the research project—the research team examined oral Chinese development and production, everyday Chinese literacy development, and identity negotiation and community, each issue being discussed in-depth in one separate chapter respectively. Of the five participants, Duff studied Mandarin informally in the 1980s for two years during her teaching at a university in China, and later on was exposed to Mandarin during her research and trips to China. The other four participants are either current or former graduate students in Chinese applied linguistics. Three of them have studied Mandarin formally and informally for more than ten years. All of them have the experience of living in Mainland China or Taiwan.

Chapter 2 studies the five participants’ overall Chinese linguistic proficiency and development using a combination of self-assessments based on Common European Framework for Language (CEFR) rubrics, two oral proficiency interviews conducted between each participant and Wang in 2009 and 2010 respectively, and data from standard Chinese language tests such as HSK that some participants took. A detailed language background of each participant is provided to demonstrate the heterogeneity in their learning trajectories and linguistic development. Due to the lack of comprehensive and widely-accepted matrices in assessing Chinese linguistic proficiency, the research focuses on a global discussion of participants’ oral abilities, lexical choices, grammar development, and linguistic identities as Chinese learners and users. CAL data are presented in charts and tables, and comparisons are made about the participants’ proficiency levels, followed by qualitative analysis of the findings. However, with only two oral interviews of five participants as the main data, the quantitative data appear to be weak in representativeness and generalizability.

Chapter 3 examines the development of everyday Chinese written literacy from a qualitative, social-practice perspective. It explores the five participants’ different levels of investment in Chinese literacy development and orthographic practices and examines their identities as learners and users of Chinese in relation to their knowledge and use of Chinese characters. To analyze the production of written Chinese, the five participants transcribed part of their own oral interviews with Wang, with or without the help of any dictionaries or word-processing tools. A comparison of the two transcriptions indicates that computer input methods significantly improve the amount of Chinese characters participants were able to produce and the degree of accuracy in terms of correct choice of the characters.

Chapter 4 features a thematic analysis of participants’ narratives from a socio-cultural perspective. Two major themes across narratives—identity and community—are explored, with a theoretical overview of previous relevant research in second language acquisition and in Chinese as an additional language, followed by in-depth analysis of participants’ narratives in relation to identity, agency, positioning and community. The participants’ learning and use of Mandarin occurs in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Canada with different groups of people such as their classmates, teachers, foreign co-workers, and Chinese friends. Issues such...