Abstract
Abstract Due to the economic growth in East and Southeast Asia, the global interest in teaching and learning Asian languages has been continually increasing in the past two decades. More and more international schools are offering Asian languages as elective second/foreign languages to adolescent learners, such as Arabic, modern Chinese (Cantonese/Mandarin), Japanese, and Malay. Since 2008, the most common grammatical mistake, shi (literally to be) had been highlighted by the Cambridge Assessment every single year in the IGCSE Mandarin (0547) examiner reports. This paper reviews the literature of the functions and the error patterns of copula verb shi and “shi…de” construction, then investigates how the textbooks describe the grammatical usages and sequence the different functions of shi for young learners. Based on the qualitative research findings, this study proposes suggestions for improving the description of grammar items in Mandarin textbooks, and illustrates the classroom activities and teaching strategies for parts of speech in the international school context. This research has implications for second language acquisition, pedagogical grammar, and teacher education for IGCSE Mandarin.
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