Teaching Students to be Discourse Pragmatists: Practices in an L2 Chinese Linguistics Class

Abstract

Chinese L2 learners can not only learn Chinese language in the classroom, but also Chinese linguistics, which is about scientific knowledge, tools, and discovery processes pertaining to the Chinese language. In this paper, I outline one area of Chinese linguistics – discourse pragmatics – and some of the most important factors relating to it that need to be incorporated into classroom teaching and describe some practices employed within an L2 Chinese linguistics class. I show that various types of authentic materials (movie clips, news media, traditional stories, spontaneous conversations, and so forth) can be used for this purpose, in a student-centered way. Some of the properties I discuss involve discourse genres, ellipses and topic chaining, interpersonal meaning negotiation using utterance-final particles, and the varied choice of terms of address for social interaction. I conclude that L2 linguistic practices of this nature can be highly relevant when learning Chinese L2 language.