A Functional Linguistic Approach to Teaching Chinese

as an Additional Language

- Helping Classroom Teachers Address the National Standards

in a Systematic Way

Jingzi Huang, Ph.D

Associate Professor

Department Chair of Curriculum and Instruction

Coordinator for World Languages Education

Monmouth University, NJ

With a rapidly growing interest in Chinese learning, the demand for qualified Chinese teachers has dramatically been increased. However, Chinese teachers in both heritage or non-heritage settings, though very often well equipped with the language capabilities, find themselves struggling in an effort to address the multiple goals (i.e., Communication, Culture, Connection, Comparison, and Community) set as the national standards for foreign language learning by ACTFL (1996). This is especially true in the situation where a teacher has tremendous experience teaching Chinese within a traditional framework emphasizing mainly on the language goal. Facing the requirement for standards-based foreign language instruction, what are the Chinese teachers struggling with in their effort to align their teaching with the national standards? Can successful foreign language program models provide helpful implications for Chinese teaching? This paper intends to explore these questions with a focus on K-12 settings.

Though “the integration of language and content” is not a novel idea in language teaching, the concept of “language as a medium of learning” (Mohan, 1986) is not well explored in the field of foreign language education. It is not a simple matter of teaching a foreign language in context or teaching it with reference to its associated culture. Beyond the question of foreign language learning, “language as a medium of learning raises the question of the relation between language learning and the learning of content and culture” (Mohan, 2001:108). Facing the current standards movement in the United State in which the goals of foreign language education go beyond language itself, classroom teachers need a framework that can help design instructional activities to address the five Cs in a more consistent way. At the curriculum level, the question is how a standards-based language program may be designed to embrace both language and content/culture as objectives in a systematic way and how activities can systematically bring the two together and go beyond.

The proposed paper has two intentions. First, based on the author's extensive experience working with both heritage and non heritage Chinese teachers, it will examine what the teachers need in their effort to embrace the national standards. This examination is based on data collected through teacher interviews, parent interviews, and classroom observations. Then, based on existing research studies, it will introduce a functional linguistic approach (Halliday, 1994) to foreign language curriculum design that may help the teachers in their effort to addresses integration. Specifically, it provides a synthesis of existing studies (e.g., Huang, 2003; Mohan & Huang, 2009) showing how the use of Mohan’s Knowledge Framework (Mohan, 1986) could help address the national standards with special attention to the integration of culture and language. The paper makes recommendations and provides implications for teacher training and classroom actions in both heritage and non-heritage language teaching settings.

Reference

ACTFL (1996). Standards for foreign language learning: Preparing for the 21^st century. Lawrence, KS: Allen Press, Inc.

Halliday, M. A. K. (1994). An introduction to functional grammar (2nd Ed.). London: Edward Arnold.

Huang, J. (2003). A Content-Based Approach to Achieving the Dual Goals of Language and Culture Learning for Young Beginners – A Case Study of an Elementary “Mandarin Chinese as a Foreign Language Program”. Language, Culture & Curriculum 16 (1), pp. 70 - 89.

Mohan, B. & Huang, J. (2009). A Functional Approach to Integrated Assessment of Teacher Support and Student Discourse Development in an Elementary Chinese Program. Linguistics and Education 13 (3), pp. 405-433.

Mohan, B. (1986). Language and content. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Mohan, B. (2001). The second language as a medium of learning. In B. Mohan, C. Leung, & C. Davison (eds), English as a second language in the mainstream: Teaching, Learning and Identity (pp. 107 – 26). Harlow, England: Pearson Education.