4. Fourth Stage:  2000 to present - Communication-oriented and Combined Methods Period

1.   Background

Chinese language education witnessed unprecedented growth at the beginning of the 21st century. The number of students who were learning Chinese, although not as large as that of languages such as French, Spanish, and German in absolute amount, has a dramatic increase rate while other languages grew slowly or even decrease in growth rate. According to the MLA Fall 2006 Language Enrollment Survey, enrollment of Chinese language classes in higher education institutions in the United States rose 30% between 2002 and 2006. The MLA survey of foreign language learning shows that Chinese enrollment at American colleges and universities increased from 34,153 in 2002 to 60,976 in 2009.^[1] In 2006, 51,582 students were enrolled in Chinese language classes offered in colleges and universities. The enrollment number of Chinese language courses between 1998 to 2002 is 5697, whereas in in 2006, this number rose to 17,249. In 2009, it became 60,976. There were more than 3,000 universities in the United States, and 700 of them had offered Chinese courses in 2009.^[2] The popularity of the Chinese language has been growing rapidly in colleges and universities in the United States. A Chinese language professor’s website shows that there are 194 higher education institutions that offer Chinese language courses in the United States.^[3] A search of Chinese language course offerings in higher education in the United States on the website of the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition of the University of Minnesota yields 762 results.^[4]

In the new era, socio-political factors, or the need for defense and national security still has a strong influence on Chinese language education in the United States.  Zhou (2011) points out that globalization has changed world language order, and therefore the United States has pressing needs to improve its multilingual capabilities, Chinese included. For example, after 9/11, the United States federal government provided tremendous funding and supported nationwide out of the “needs to engage foreign governments and peoples.” Such programs include the National Language Security Initiative initiated by the Department of Education, State, Defense, Department of State National Flagship Language Initiative, and its subprograms. Several reasons contribute to this phenomenon. First, the critical language strategy implemented by the United States Department of Education, the Department of State, the Department of Defense, and the Office of Director of National Intelligence made Chinese one of the emphasized language in the United States. Economically, China surpassed Japan and became the second-largest economy in the world. With the development, an increasing number of students in the United States developed an interest in learning Chinese and knowing more about China. Besides, Chinese has become incorporated into SAT and AP courses, prompting more students to learn it.

Chinese language teaching has become more professionalized in this period, and Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) is increasingly recognized as a discipline. For instance, the number of members of Chinese is the second-largest at the ACTFL annual meetings. Publications of Chinese language learning materials have surged, and enrollment and funding for Chinese language learning in the United States have significantly increased. At the same time, hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in relevant fields.^[5]  Chinese had become the 7th largest foreign language in the United States. In 2014, Chinese ranked second in terms of the rate of increase in the foreign language class enrollment. The curriculum of Chinese language education in colleges and universities in the United States has improved and solidified and become increasingly mature.

2.   Organizations and programs

In light of the critical importance of foreign language education to national security, Federal government funding continues and expands the support for Chinese language education inherited from the NDEA. In 2005, the U.S.-China Cultural Engagement Act provided 1.3 billion dollars to support the China-focused curriculum. In 2006, the United States federal government started to provide funding to the National Security Language Initiative (NSLI), and the Foreign Language Assistance Program (FLAP). Up to 1 billion dollars were allocated to support the study of critical languages in K-16 education, Chinese included. The United States Department of Education funded 70 Chinese language programs in three states (Ohio, North Carolina, and Wisconsin).  The National Security Education Program supported four Chinese flagship programs, aiming to produce global professionals who speak Chinese at high levels of proficiency. ACTFL, just like the MLA when it participated in the  Audio Lingual Method for the NDEA, played a crucial role in pedagogy innovation in the Language Flagship program, Chinese included.  Proficiency-based Instruction and the OPI have gained growing recognition.

On top of that, ACTFL established a pedagogical framework to address the challenge of globalization in the 21st Century, which is World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages - Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities. As Liao (2015) points out,  two main streams represent Chinese language education at the college level are: Princeton University, which inherits the audio-lingual tradition and focuses on “hard core drilling instruction”,^[6] and the Ohio State University, which focuses on more communicative and culture-oriented pedagogy.  Many elite colleges and universities, especially those that enjoy a long history of Chinese language education and played an important role in establishing the audio-lingual tradition, are allies of the former while participating universities of the Flagship program incline to the latter. It is promoted through their Chinese language education practice in the United States and summer study abroad Chinese language programs and short-term Chinese language training programs.^[7] The check and balance of the two universities represent the two poles of Chinese language education at the college level in the United States.

3.   Pedagogy

With the rising number of students and increasing support from various sources, the Chinese language is challenging the global language order, and thus Chinese language pedagogy in this period started to prosper. Among the pedagogies introduced into Chinese language education in the previous stage, ACTFL’s Proficiency-based Instruction has been gaining ground in this period. This method has not only integrated the four skills but also gives operable guidelines for communicative language instruction and cross-cultural communication. For example, it analyzes the process of communication and categorizes communicative activities into five primary types: description, narration, comparison, giving directions, and solving complicated problems. This framework provides tremendous help to teachers because they can have a clear idea when designing communicative activities for classroom instruction, no matter what the topics or language points to teach are.

The two main streams of Chinese language pedagogy co-exist because they have distinct and complementary advantages. According to Liao (2015), Princeton's Audio Lingual Method emphasizes the accuracy and fluency in terms of learning outcomes. It is beneficial in laying a solid foundation in mastering the linguistic components of the Chinese language, especially for the beginning and intermediate level students. However, it believes that it is not a language instructor's responsibility to teach culture in the classroom. According to the Princeton Method, everything in classroom instruction should center around linguistic accuracy and fluency. On the contrary, Ohio State University's Culture Performance approach, ACTFL's Performance-based Instruction, and other communication-oriented teaching methodologies focus on using the Chinese language in culturally appropriate situations as well as students' linguistic abilities. Communication-oriented pedagogy takes a more comprehensive approach to view language proficiency. The combined use of Chinese language pedagogies is embodied in the textbooks and classroom instruction in this period.

In this period, linguistic studies prosper and has shifted from structuralism to pragmatics, social linguistics, cultural linguistics, cognitive linguistics, computational linguistics, language acquisition, rhetorical studies, and so on. Non-structural aspects of language and language use such as context, social and cultural connotations, human behavior and psychology, have all been studied in connection with language. The transformation in linguistics has provided tremendous useful resources and insights to Chinese language education in the United States, especially in terms of revealing the various properties of language that have been ignored in Chinese language teaching and learning. The diversity in linguistic studies contribute to a more holistic view on language and its connections with the larger world, which thus expands the focus of second language pedagogy. It is just what Chinese language education in this period needs when the student population and motivations of learning Chinese changed dramatically in a globalized era.

The shift in education and psychology also contributes to the transformation of Chinese language education in this period. Student-centered education and active learning have been gaining ground in the 21st century because technological advancement and social transformation have provided conditions to realize more unfulfilled human potential. Schools of psychology such as behaviorism and structuralism that contain the rigidity of industrial capitalism are obsolete in a diverse and creative era. Therefore studies of education and psychology have been gradually shifting towards a more holistic view of human development, of which language is an essential component. Chinese language education in the United States has been gradually shifting towards contributing to cultivating more wholesome global citizens as well.

4.   Textbooks: Integrated Chinese

4-1 Cover of Integrated Chinese   

4-2 Title Page of Lesson 9 of Integrated Chinese, showing the learning objectives and culture, community, connections component of the lesson.

Integrated Chinese (IC) is the most widely-used Chinese textbook in colleges and universities in the United States, especially for lower-level students. In the Spring semester of 2015, there were 530 Chinese programs in higher education in the United States, and 47.6% of the novice and intermediate programs among them used this textbook series. Besides, it has been increasingly used in advanced level Chinese language courses in colleges and universities in the United States as well. It attempts to create a more holistic approach to Chinese language learning by combining the four essential skills that were traditionally given various weights under different pedagogical models. The Chinese language in this book has become a more holistic system in connection with non-structural elements such as context, culture, register, and so on. In the preface of the book, it says that "[e]ver since its inception in 1997, IC has been a communication-oriented language textbook which also aims at laying a solid foundation in language form and accuracy for students."^[8]

Exercises in this book target various skill sets of Chinese language learning. For instance, Exercise H of Lesson 2 on page 57 is a grammar exercise. Its purpose is to practice “都 dōu both, all.” The student is supposed to connect the sentences with “都 dōu both, all.” Besides, the student is also expected to say the full connected sentence out, as is required by the Audio Lingual Method, and write the sentence down. To finish the exercise, they also need to be able to read and recognize the characters to understand the clauses to be connected. Before they can speak the connected sentences out loud, they should also be able to listen to the teacher or other audio sources reading the clauses to be joined. It is a comprehensive exercise that trains students to improve all of their skills.

The combination of the communicative approach is also reflected in the learning objectives, which are expressed in the form of communicative tasks, for example, the learning objectives of Lesson 10 Transportation are:

• Comment about several means of transportation;

• Explain how to travel from one station to another;

• Describe a traffic route;

• Express your gratitude after receiving a personal favor;

• Offer New Year’s wishes.^[9]

The learning objectives are all written in simple active verbs that clearly describe what the students need to grasp after learning this lesson. They are also all performance tasks that language users would perform in real life. According to the authors of Integrated Chinese, the clear objectives and performance tasks are designed to motivate learners and to stay on track of the objectives.  Checklists are provided at the end of each chapter to reinforce the awareness of the learning objectives, which are goals of communication using the Chinese language. There are also questions on cultural comparison and connection for students to understand more about their communities and the Chinese speaking communities.

4-3 Page 254 of Integrated Chinese. It is part of Lesson 10, the theme of which is Transportation.

In terms of context, this book is incorporating authentic materials to create authentic settings for students’ language learning. Page 254 includes a real Beijing subway map, a picture of a subway entrance in Beijing, and an image of the headlight of a Beijing Taxi, all with Chinese characters written on them. Students would be able to learn the Chinese characters in real context through the authentic materials instead of memorizing them mechanically through rote learning.

4-4 Pages 261-262 Integrated Chinese. The pages show typical exercises of the book.

Integrated Chinese also inherits the traditions of the Audio Lingual textbooks. Many student activities are of the same format as those in the audio-lingual textbooks. For example, drill exercises such as the substitution table take a fair portion of all the student activities in this book.  Exercises on pages 261 and 262 of Integrated Chinese are necessarily the same as the substitution drilling exercises in the DeFrancis book. Exercise D on page 261 is about the structure “还是...吧... (hái shì… ba… let’s do … instead). It offers a series of words and phrases that appeared in previous lessons essentially as items on the substitution table. Students learn through filling in the blanks in the sentence structure and saying or writing the full sentence. There are some adaptations and modifications of the traditional audio-lingual exercises. Flex example, Exercise C “先...再... xiān... zài… first... then…” uses pictures to demonstrate the items on the substitution table rather than list the items in words.

Overall, Integrated Chinese is an excellent textbook that combines the strengths of traditional and current pedagogies. Although it states that the book aims to help students lay a solid foundation in the Chinese language per se, as well as cultivate their ability to communicate in real contexts, it is more inclined to the Audio-Lingual approach. Most of the exercises in the beginning level textbooks are repetitive drilling activities. It may be because the majority of authors of the book are professors from elite universities in the United States that still insist on the audio-lingual tradition. It represents a relatively more conservative side of Chinese language education in higher education in the United States. Chinese Link, another widely-used Chinese textbook in colleges and universities in the United States, goes a step further in realizing communicative-oriented approaches.

5.   Textbooks: Chinese Link^[10]

Chinese Link is a representative Chinese textbook of this period. Like Integrated Chinese, it attempts to combine the advantages of both the Audio Lingual Method and Proficiency-based Instruction to achieve an ideal teaching and learning outcome.

The series of textbooks is designed around developing the students' capability in using the Chinese language to complete tasks in real life. Take Part 1 of Level 1 of the series as an example. This book has 11 sessions and three review lessons. As Kaiming Intermediate Chinese, all the titles of the units in this book are themes of everyday life, such as greetings, addresses, phone calls, time and schedule, and ordering food. In the Objectives section at the beginning of each lesson, the book lists all the objectives that aim at improving the student's ability to conduct real-life communication. For example, the objectives of Lesson 1 are "Greet people in Chinese" and "Answer yes-no questions," and those of lesson 2 are "Get acquainted and exchange names" and "Ask who someone is." They are all pragmatics items essential for daily communication, and there is no fixed list of grammar points that the student should internalize through intensive drill exercises. It is a step further than Kaiming Intermediate Chinese, whose list of learning objectives were still influenced by the Audio Lingual Method.  

Technology is strongly enhanced in this book. Compared to the technology in an audio-lingual lab and the videos of Kaiming Intermediate Chinese, the educational technology for Chinese Links is much more sophisticated to support supports a more communication-oriented pedagogy. It helps the instructor to spend more time on communicative activities in classroom instruction by assisting with more mechanical tasks that students could complete by themselves. Although a student learns the most when engaging in communicative activities, the instructor would need a large amount of scaffolding before a student would be able to do it. A proper amount of mechanical tasks, such as those in the Audio Lingual Method and Translation-Grammar Method, are still indispensable in the scaffolding. Because, as a second language learner, analytical and repetitive structural learning is always necessary for them to navigate an unfamiliar system. Translation is still an essential and efficient way of learning the meanings of words and texts. However, as vital as they are, a language instructor needs to control the time spent on such activities so that more precious classroom instruction time could be allocated to improving their capabilities to communicate in real contexts and culturally appropriate ways. In reality, a Chinese language instructor finds it challenging to do so because of the limited time for student preparation and instructional design. Because he/she is burdened with heavy tasks such as grading homework and helping students with essential and necessary language learning that the students could do by themselves. Such problems could be alleviated by the computer system through automating the mechanical tasks traditionally conducted by teachers in the audio-lingual classroom. Teachers could thus shift more of their focus towards designing and conducting communicative activities. The book has a code for each instructor and student, which provides access to an elaborate online system where homework can be assigned and checked automatically. Instructors can choose from exercises from the database in the online system as the homework, or design their homework. They could also communicate with students through the online education system and download resources such as videos and handouts.

This book also emphasizes on culture and context. For instance, at the beginning of each unit, there is a section titled Connections and Communities Preview. In this section, students compare their own cultures and communities with those in the Chinese-speaking areas. At the beginning of Lesson 1 Greetings, students compare how to greet each other in their own cultures and Chinese-speaking cultures. There is also a picture of a server in Shanghai, China greeting passengers in Chinese, and a caption introducing how Chinese people greet each other. At the end of each lesson, there is a Culture Links section introducing cultural knowledge of Chinese-speaking areas and how to use verbal and non-verbal expressions to communicate in specific cultural contexts. At the end of Lesson 1, knowledge of how Chinese people greet each other and how to express them in context-appropriate expressions are introduced.

4-5 In order: Cover of Chinese Link. Page 1 shows the teaching objectives and pre-class cultural discussions. Page 11 shows various interesting communicative activities. Pages 12-14 show how culture of the Chinese-speaking areas is introduced along with the linguistic structures related to the culture. They provide scenarios of greeting real Chinese people, and simple rules and ways of greeting people in real life. Then students are asked on how they could greet those people.

In addition to the conventional “你好 Nǐ hǎo Hi”, the book also introduces more authentic ways of greeting others, such as “早 zǎo Morning!” and “嗨 Hāi Hi!”. There are even very Chinese ways of greeting people, such as “吃了吗” (Chī le ma？), which literally means “Did you eat?” In this section, the book concisely compares three different ways of greetings and points out that this expression is “used close to meal time” and “doesn’t really asks about whether the other person in the dialogue has eaten or not.”^[11] It is very useful to second language learners at the beginner level who have very limited knowledge of either culturally specific idiomatic expressions or their usages. The explanations focus on the functions of the expression in real-life situations, which ingeniously avoids too many grammatical jargons and combines culture, language, and communication in a natural way.

To help students lay a solid foundation in the Chinese language per se, Chinese Link inherits the pyramid drilling method. It starts from Lesson 1. For example, on page 10 of the book, Exercise 1-6 is a pyramid exercise about the most basic structures. This exercise is very helpful for students to understand the mechanisms of the Chinese language because of its analytical characteristics. Through assembling the different parts together according to grammar rules, students learn how the language works. A distinctive grammatical feature of the Chinese language is its word order because different word orders of the same language components in Chinese may result in completely different meanings. In many cases, the word order of Chinese language is different from that of English, as is shown in the literal translation of the pyramid exercise above. The pyramid exercise is especially helpful in the acquisition of the word order. In addition, it combines exercises of Chinese characters and grammar, which makes the language learning process more holistic. It also shows that the field is changing progressively, inheriting best practice while breaking the limitations of the traditions by absorbing the advantages of new pedagogies.

But Chinese Link doesn’t stop here. There are a fair portion of Communicative Activities in each lesson. The rationale is that after students have grasped the language components they have learned in class, they need to use the language components they have learned for communication in real contexts, for example, to obtain information, to express emotions, to build relationships, and so on. These activities are performance tasks and fulfill the goal of teaching and learning how to use language to fulfil real life functions.

4-7 Page 119 of Chinese Link. It shows some communicative activities in this book. 

Overall, Chinese Link represents a further step towards communication-oriented pedagogy. Its combination of the best of two worlds, the Audio Lingual Method, and the Proficiency-based language instruction model, represents a steady progress. Its widespread use in colleges and universities in the United States facilitate and accelerate the progress.

(6)  Classroom Instruction: University of Virginia

As mentioned before, although there has been tremendous progress towards communicative-oriented pedagogy, the Audio Lingual Method still enjoys a solid status in colleges and universities in the United States. The two methodologies or approaches both have their respective advantages: generally speaking, the Audio Lingual Method is highly effective in laying a solid foundation in the target language. Proficiency-based Instruction and performance tasks are better for helping students produce language appropriate to the various settings and contexts. This is obviously a binary view of language instruction because in reality, both aspects matter for language learners. However, methodologies are limited - they need to capture the most urgent priority of the time when they were invented, just as the learning of a second language is always limited at a certain point too. As language educators, it is essential to make decisions based on their specific situations to maximize the students’ learning experience. Therefore in classroom instruction, how to get the best of both worlds while choosing the best part based on the specific situation in the classroom.

The students in the video are having a Chinese lesson at the University of Virginia. They had learned Chinese for 3 months, around 4 hours per week when the video was made. The class in the video^[12] is representative of the current pedagogy of Chinese language in colleges and universities in the United States: a combination of the Audio Lingual traditions and communication-oriented.  

The Audio Lingual Method still accounts for a fair portion of classroom instruction: drill instruction dominated by repetitive intensive teacher-led questions and answers; maximizing authentic input of the target language; low tolerance on errors, especially those in pronunciation; small class size and individual drill instruction of each student to ensure everyone is correct; the pyramid method; and so on.

However, it is less intensive and more communicative compared to when the Audio Lingual Method was implemented at the DLI in the 1950s and 1960s. The intensity of such drill instruction is lower and communication between the teacher and the student is more natural and authentic. For example, the teacher asks the student in Chinese: “Are you happy that we don’t have classes tomorrow?” And the student says: “ Yes, I am happy.^[13]”  Then everyone in the classroom laughs. Obviously, they have understood the Chinese dialogue between the student and the teacher. Although the instructor intends to help the students practice the structure 上课 (shàng kè, to have class), she uses authentic language and non-verbal communication methods to converse with the students in a real context while consciously paying attention to the linguistic details of the student’s utterance.

Another example is the Interview activity that the instructor designed for the class. She asks the students to conduct an interview with the structures they just practiced through audio-lingual drilling exercises. The interview is a performance task that people use in their daily life. The instructor uses a picture from the Late Night Show with Jay Leno where the host is interviewing former President Obama to demonstrate the meaning of the word “采访 (cǎi fǎng interview)” to the students and create a real context for language use. Students understand that what they are going to next is not purely for drilling instruction. Instead, they have to think about the scenario where they are going to use the designated structures to communicate for real life purposes. The students work collaboratively in groups, which puts the linguistics structures students learned through drilling instruction in a use. Linguistic structures, instead of being treated as isolated static elements, thus becomes an important part of a larger system where they are connected with other elements to function as the medium of communication.

In this lesson, group communicative activities, elements of Chinese culture and creation of real context were incorporated for a more holistic learning experience. Real life communication and culture have played a more important role in classroom instruction in spite of the predominance of the Audio Lingual Method. For example, interactive activities and multimedia technology are incorporated in classroom instruction to provide a more authentic context for the linguistic structures students are learning in addition to complementing the mechanic drill instruction of the Audio-Lingual Method.

The transition between and co-existence of the two methodologies reflect how the field of Chinese language education views what Chinese language learning means, and how the new and the old methodologies compete against and complement each other. On a deeper level, they reflect how the supporting forces of Chinese language education view what language learning is and the social background in which they came to their point of view.