The past two decades have seen an increasing interest in theory and practice in Chinese language teaching and research. However, little empirical research exists in this area. This volume brings together a collection of studies that is cutting edge in its theory, design, approach, and perspective of teaching and researching Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) to inform interested readers about current practice and issues.
A variety of topics have been explored in the volume, including the acquisition of the ba construction in Chinese, development of radical and word knowledge, development of discourse knowledge in writing, language processing through free recall, reading strategies, language attrition, and distance learning. Of particular interest and importance are Shen’s study on radical knowledge and Xiao’s study on writing development. Given that Chinese employs a nonalphabetic writing system, Shen addresses a critical element in learning Chinese characters—the radical. Chinese radicals are “the smallest meaningful orthographic units in compound characters” (p. 46), and they serve as phonetic or semantic cues in Chinese character recognition. Although a few studies have been conducted to investigate CFL learners’ radical knowledge, Shen’s results from a semester-long study provide valuable insights to teachers and textbook writers about the relationship between radical knowledge and vocabulary acquisition. Xiao’s study contributes to another less researched area (i.e., CFL writing). Readers will benefit from the discussion on discourse features in writing development, particularly by Chinese heritage learners.
Although the topics included in the volume cover a wide scope, they are presented in a unified way such that all studies are based on empirical data collected from CFL learners within the SLA framework. It is a bit disappointing to note that the volume does not provide a concluding chapter to review problems in current pedagogical practice and issues for future research. Despite this slight criticism, it is an excellent resource for researchers and classroom practitioners on the various aspects of linguistic and cognitive development in learning CFL.
