Teaching Advanced Spoken Chinese:

Integration of accuracy and cultural awareness in word choices

Dr. Ching-Hsuan Wu

Bentley University

Advanced Chinese learners, in general, are able to verbally express themselves and communicate with others on a variety of topics. In addition, they usually possess knowledge, to a certain extent, with respect to Chinese culture, such as history, cultural practice, and art. With such speaking skills and knowledge in Chinese language and culture, the advanced Chinese speakers are not often concerned with getting meaning across. However, they can find it challenging to be precise in word choice, including both structural patterns and vocabulary. As a result of being imprecise, not necessarily being wrong, utterances of the advanced Chinese learners can be grammatically correct but idiomatically or culturally inappropriate. An example of such an utterance is “系主任您好，我現在通知您，由於我要去台北參加一個研討會，所以我下星期上會來上課.” Another example is “昨晚，我陪我母親在陽台上賞月，看著月出那淡黃的顏色，我和我母親頓時間心都感到暖暖的.” One more example is “(電話應答)老闆，你要自己走出來接王先生呢？還是要王先生自己走進去？” The indiscriminate use of the vocabulary words like the above are not uncommon, and most of them are not predicable as the range of conversation topics among the advanced Chinese learners is widened rapidly as they progress daily. Therefore, emphases of pedagogical teaching approaches to treat this type of intricate problems need to be placed not only on introduction of linguistic properties of certain vocabulary or structures, but, more importantly, on effective allocation of second language learners’ attentional resources towards how native speakers of Mandarin Chinese perform the language pragmatically. In the paper, a collection of common mistakes regarding problematic word choice made by the advanced Chinese speakers is presented. Following the discussions on the mistakes, pedagogical tasks that can be utilized in Chinese classrooms to promote grammatically correct and culturally appropriate speeches are introduced.