Browsing by Subject "foreign language learning"

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The Third Space in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language: A Reconceptualization of the Conventional Pedagogical Approach
(2019-12) Cockrum, Paul David; Lai, Chiu-Mi
Learning a foreign language is a required part of most high school and collegiate curriculums, so most people have experienced learning a foreign language at some point in their lives. Additionally, with the rapid rate of globalization, traveling to a Chinese-speaking country has become more common in the 21st Century. Accordingly, the educational literature is rife with discussions of how best to teach language, and since the 1980’s, how culture should be taught in the language classroom. However, engaging with this discourse on the importance of culture in language instruction, this thesis argues that creating a third space approach establishes effective principles for achieving holistic learning outcomes. The third space represents a continuum between that of the student’s own base culture and that of the target culture, emphasizing that bridging two authentic reproductions carries critical pedagogical value. The learning outcome of a third space classroom is quotidian communicative competence, mirroring that of the immersion approach, but with an added focus on metalinguistic cultural awareness. The third space classroom places emphasis on advancing students in both linguistic and cultural knowledge while taking the background of the student into consideration. The objective of the thesis is not to overhaul the conventional Chinese language classroom curriculum. Rather, this thesis argues for the embedding of the third space in existing curricula and thus presents a reconceptualization of the mainstream pedagogical approach in the US. The third space pedagogical approach aims to address the exclusion of cultural topics within the language classroom and argues that language and culture-based instruction can be successfully integrated from the beginning of a student’s exposure to the language and should not be treated as advanced level material. In the third space pedagogical approach, the student is encouraged to learn the language as it relates to their lives, not through the roles of artificial characters created for a textbook. This approach complements conventional textbooks that provide necessary grammatical instruction and vocabulary lists. However, the principles of the third space still allows for flexibility and adaptation on the part of the instructor to personalize the language materials. The purpose of the third space approach is not to reinvent the wheel in Chinese language education, but instead to serve as a reconceptualized approach to achieving the same linguistic learning outcomes. In other words, third space pedagogical principles are embedded in the curricular approach to teaching language and not a fundamental shift away from language to culture.