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Article published In: Chinese as a Second Language (漢語教學研究—美國中文教師學會學報)
Vol. 57:3 (2022) ► pp.238–269

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Building a corpus of spoken Chinese interlanguage and some results of preliminary analyses

ORCiD logo with link | Middlebury College
Published online: 27 February 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/csl.18015.du
Abstract
The corpus of spoken Chinese interlanguage in this study consists of over one million characters of transcribed student speech from data collected from nearly ten years of study abroad research. The main research method was a comparison with a similar corpus of spoken Chinese by native speakers. Preliminary analyses show that 11 of the top 20 most frequent words in both the learner corpus and native corpus are the same. Learners used some grammatical function words, such as 把 (bǎ), 了 (le), 它 (tā), and 着 (zhe) less than native speakers, while other ones, such as 我 (wǒ) and 的 (de), much more frequently. Possible explanations for these patterns, as well as pedagogical implications and directions for further research are discussed.
摘要
本文描述了以本文作者历时近十年收集的美国大学生在中国留学的口语语料基础上建立的百万余汉字的中介语口语语料库，并报告了初步的分析研究结果。与一个类似的母语口语语料库比较的结果显示，在中介语语料库和母语语料库中使用最频繁的20个词中，有11个 是相同的。学习者使用的 “把, 了, 它, 着” 等语法功能词比母语者少得多，但使用的 “我”、“的” 等词比母语者多得多。本文分析了出现这些现象的可能原因，并提出了教学方面的探讨及对未来研究方向的展望。
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Literature review
    • Corpus Linguistics in second language acquisition and teaching research
    • Spoken corpora of L2 Chinese
  • Developing a corpus of spoken Chinese interlanguage
    • Chinese learning background of the students
    • Program in China
    • Data collection
      • Stage I
      • Stage II
      • Stage III
    • Building the corpus
    • Analyzing data in corpus linguistics research
  • Preliminary analyses
    • Theoretical background: The Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA)
    • Research Questions
    • Method
      • Native reference corpus
      • Word segmentation
      • Research tool
    • Results
      • Wordlists and some initial observations
      • Keywords
    • Comparisons of 把,了, and 着
      • 我
      • 的
      • 它
      • 很 vs. 挺
      • 是…的
  • Discussion
    • 我
    • 的
    • 它
    • 很 vs. 挺
  • Pedagogical implications
    • Helping students address the underuse issue
    • Helping students develop pragmatic competence
  • Limitations and further research
  • Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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