William R. Kenan Professor of East Asian Languages and Literature Hong Gang Jin and Lian Xue, teaching fellow in Chinese, presented a paper at the annual American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages/Chinese Language Teachers Association (ACTFL/CLTA) conference on Nov. 18 in Denver.
In the paper, “Attention to What? An Empirical Study on the Linkage between Attention and Language Input,” Jin and Xue discussed the results of their research into the learning of Chinese as a foreign language with reference to different levels of complexity, abstractness and native-target language differences. Their study involving 29 students learning Chinese as a foreign language focused on the students’ acquisition of the syntactic structure of the Chinese potential complement “le” (complex and abstract) and 10 new lexical items in Chinese (neither complex nor abstract).
