Comparing Teachers' Judgments of Learners' Speech in Chinese as a Foreign Language

Abstract

Pedagogical norms for Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) shared by teachers, curriculum writers, and resource designers inside and outside of Chinese societies are yet to be established. To initiate and inform dialogue within the CFL community over shared expectations of learners, this study compared the judgments of students' oral presentations rendered by three groups of teachers: first language (L1) teachers of Chinese in China, L1 teachers of Chinese in Australia, and second language (L2) teachers of Chinese in Australia, where Chinese has been taught in K–16 schools for more than 25 years. The aim was to ascertain the nature and range of features that the three groups noticed and found acceptable and to identify differences in perspectives, including those that were tacitly understood and those that were overtly stated. Results showed considerable common ground on which to create norms for the growing number of CFL programs. However, the data also revealed strong differences between L1 teachers and L2 teachers on the nature of the speaker–audience relationship being sought, suggesting deeper conceptual differences along L1-L2 lines about this particular aspect of students' oral communication. These findings call for committed intercultural dialogue over “appropriate meaning schemata for FL [foreign language] learners” (Kramsch, 2002) as well as further research.