Istvan Kecskes - Key Issues in Chinese as a Second Language Research

There is a rapidly growing interest in the Chinese language all over the world. However, the interest in Chinese language learning and teaching has not yet resulted in the development of a strong research background for the discipline. Without that, Chinese language learning remains only a unique experience and/or a useful education challenge. Recently, however, several attempts have been made to change this situation. The publication of three books (Han, 2014; Kecskes, 2013; Jiang, 2014) that offer a snapshot of the research trends in the field and the launch of the bilingual journal CASLAR (Chinese as a Second Language Research) by De Gruyter Mouton have represented serious endeavors in the development of the field. We briefly review three selected volumes from the available ones just to show that there is still room out there for new publications.

ZhaoHong Han (2014). Studies in Second Language Acquisition of Chinese . Multilingual Matters . The book contains six studies on different topics. There is no coherence as far as the addressed issues are concerned (case of path expressions, study of request, peer-group interaction, task-based teaching, effectiveness of recast and working memory, mixed-sensory mode presentation). All authors are Chinese, four of them from the US and two of them from Korea and New Zealand.

Istvan Kecskes (2013). Research Trends in Chinese as a Second Language . De Gruyter Mouton. The volume consists of three chapters. Chapter I: Research Base for Practice contains three papers, each of which uses research findings as a basis for solving issues connected with practical language teaching. Chapter II: Integrating Culture and Language is about one of the most intriguing topics of current language-oriented research: how to integrate culture into the process of language teaching. Chapter III: Acquisition of Language Structures consists of studies that investigate the acquisition of certain grammatical structures in Chinese. There are only a few papers in the literature on this issue, so the articles in the chapter are especially important for further research.

Nan Jiang (2014). Advances in Chinese as a Second Language . Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This is a selection of papers from an international conference on Chinese as a second language (CSL) held on November 1112, 2012, at the University of Maryland. As such, it represents a variety of topics. It contains 14 papers organized into two chapters: Acquisition of Chinese as a Second language , Processing of Chinese as a Second Language .

These books and others are very much needed. However, there is one thing that is still missing: a book that presents the basic nature of research in CSL. The title of this volume is Key Issues in Chinese as a Second Language Research. We selected this title because we wanted to produce a volume that puts CASLAR in perspective. In this book, we attempt to demonstrate how existing knowledge has been generated by research, bring together different lines of research and point out tendencies in the field, demonstrate and explain what tools and methods researchers can use to address major issues in the field, and give direction to what future research should focus on. In sum, we need a book that addresses key issues in CASLAR. This is what this project aims to accomplish.