Can Grammatical Knowledge Predict Chinese Proficiency?
This study explored how to assess the explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge of learners of Chinese, and their relationship to learners’ overall Chinese language proficiency. The participants were 85 learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) at
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Can Grammatical Knowledge Predict Chinese Proficiency? Liu Li
Abstract This study explored how to assess the explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge of learners of Chinese, and their relationship to learners’ overall Chinese language proficiency. The participants were 85 learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) at universities in the USA. A test battery included three parts: (1) a timed grammaticality judgment test (GJT) and an oral repetition task for implicit grammatical knowledge; (2) an untimed GJT and an error correction task for explicit grammatical knowledge; and (3) a general language proficiency test. A set of correlation coefficients were computed to explore the contributions of implicit and explicit grammatical knowledge to overall proficiency. The results showed that there was no statistically significant correlation between the CFL learners’ implicit grammatical knowledge and their proficiency scores, but there was a strong relationship between their explicit grammatical knowledge and their general proficiency. Further multiple regression analyses demonstrated that explicit knowledge better predicted the CFL learners’ general L2 proficiency. These findings are discussed in light of how the relationship of implicit and explicit grammatical knowledge with general proficiency might be influenced by learners’ actual level of proficiency or learning stage and how general proficiency is tested. Pedagogical implications are also discussed.
Keywords Implicit grammatical knowledge Explicit grammatical knowledge Language proficiency Assessment Chinese as a foreign language
Introduction Grammar is an integral component of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) curriculum and pedagogy, and a large amount of instructional time is usually spent on grammar to promote CFL learners’ grammatical competence (Xing 2006). Despite its L. Li (&) Ball State University, Muncie, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 D. Zhang and C.-H. Lin (eds.), Chinese as a Second Language Assessment, Chinese Language Learning Sciences, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4089-4_7
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important status in Chinese teaching and learning, grammar has rarely become a direct and legitimate topic in Chinese assessment; there has been little attempt in the CFL community to study the assessment of grammatical knowledge (Jin et al. 2012). To fill this gap in CFL assessment, we conducted a study that assessed CFL learners’ grammatical knowledge and examined its relationship with learners’ overall Chinese proficiency. There were two major objectives of the study. First, we aimed to develop and validate measures to assess CFL learners’ grammatical knowledge. In alignment with the recent development of research on acquisition of second language (L2) grammar (N. Ellis 2008; R. Ellis 2005), we differentiated between implicit and explicit knowledge of grammar, and assessed both types. Second, previous studies on L2 grammatical knowledge have produced mixed findings about the relative importance of implicit and explicit kno
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