Teaching Advanced Chinese with Authentic Materials

This CALPER project is developing a practical guide to selected features of natural spoken Chinese, which will specifically highlight important interactive aspects of the spoken language. The materials are aimed at students who have had at least 300 hours of instruction in Chinese but will also be valuable for teachers who would like to use them with somewhat less advanced students. We have gathered a large collection of conversational Mandarin Chinese, which forms the basis for the materials. The data come from speakers discussing readings, narrating stories from their past, talking to each other while playing games, talking about movies, talking on campus tours, conversing with each other at dinner parties, and talking while shopping at a farmers' market.

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TEACHING AND LEARNING MATERIALS:

Working with Spoken Chinese
is a series of online teaching and learning materials for high-intermediate / advanced learners (ACTFL Speaking Proficiency) of Mandarin Chinese, which can be used in instructed settings or for self-study. Use of the units is free, but registration is required.

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Professional Development Materials

• Chinese Corpus Resource Guide [PDF (~307k)]. Download information on the left sidebar

• A Corpus Worker's Toolkit. Online. Go to the right sidebar

• "Developing Teaching Materials with Authentic Data and Corpus Analysis Tools". Presented at the 3rd UC Language Consortium Conference, UCLA, April 23, 2006 [powerpoint]

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In Professional Journals

Tao, H. (2005). "The gap between natural speech and spoken Chinese teaching material: Discourse perspectives on Chinese pedagogy." Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, 40(2), 1-24.

Tao, H. (2004). "Introduction" to special issue on "Corpora, language use, and grammar." Journal of Chinese Language and Computing, 14.

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Project Director: Hongyin Tao, University of California-Los Angeles Graduate Assistant: Wei Lai, The Pennsylvania State University