Pragmatic strategies in L2 Chinese classroom

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Jun Wang

Wisconsin-Madison

 

 

 

In spite of the numerous research done by observing classroom interaction with reference to pragmatic strategies, L2 Chinese classroom communicative strategies (CSs) is a gap needed to be filled. Inspired by Björkman (2010, 2014) and Gotti (2014) who both studied CSs from the data in English as an academic lingua franca, this research aims to analyze the communicative strategies (CSs) used by lecturers and students in L2 Chinese classroom at different proficiency levels in American universities. The material comprises 23.5 hours of digital recordings of class sessions from second-year Chinese to fourth-year Chinese in an American university’s intensive language summer program. There are two types of class sessions: one is called “drill” session which intends to lead students to practice grammar patterns one by one through communication and another session is called “discussion” session which tries to engage students using multiple learned grammar patterns by talking about various topics. All the lecturers are native-Chinese speakers and the students are non-native Chinese speakers from all over the world. The L1 of most students is English. This study tries to explore the following questions:

1) what are the CSs used in L2 Chinese classroom by lecturers and students to ensure communication effectiveness, especially when they are experiencing communication difficulties?

2) Do lecturers and students show that they employ different CSs at different proficiency levels?

3) Do lecturers and students show that they use different CSs when they are in different class types-- the “drill” session and the “discussion” session?

The methodology employed are mainly qualitative. The research will re-examine the taxonomy of CSs in natural English as a Lingua Franca interactions in Björkman’s (2014) work and the facilitating strategies listed by Gotti (2014) and provide the common CSs used in L2 Chinese language classroom.

Descriptive quantitative method is used for outlining the number of cases of pragmatic strategies used in different class types and at different proficiency levels for general tendency. The study is working on the first research question. The research so far found the common strategies in previous work including explicitness strategies, comprehension checks, clarification checks, word replacement are all used in the L2 Chinese classrooms, but they are not in a high frequency. As for the second and third research questions, the current research is still working in progress. At last, based on the observation, the research will provide some effective CSs for the future L2 Chinese classroom teaching.