The Development of Chinese Fluency During Study Abroad in China

Abstract

This article is part of a longitudinal study of American college students studying Mandarin in China. Its main data are drawn from monthly speaking events (four sessions with each student) conducted in Chinese with each of 29 participants in a study‐abroad program in China. The study yielded these results: (a) Students made significant progress in their fluency development, especially during the first month; (b) speaking Chinese both inside and outside of class helped fluency; (c) students who consistently spoke Chinese in class and out of class made more progress than those who did not; and (d) time on task, the amount of time that students spent using Chinese, was the most important factor in determining fluency development. The quantitative analysis that is the focus of this article is supplemented by qualitative data from individual students, reflecting the position that only a combination of quantitative and qualitative data can reveal a complete picture of the nature of language acquisition during study abroad. The article concludes with implications for the design and conduct of programs in China.

The Development of L2 Fluency During Study Abroad: A Cross‐Language Study

“…Caution is also needed when comparing the gains in longest run and mean length of run that were exclusive to the Mandarin group because they may be attributable to the way these temporal measures were calculated and to typological differences between the languages. In her analysis of Mandarin learners, Du () did not adopt these disfluency measures because Mandarin does not have a rich morphology featuring the tense markers and subject–verb agreement that can cause breakdowns in languages such as Spanish, and previous research has not established 400 milliseconds as a definitive cutoff point to mark disfluency in the language. In the present analysis, total number of characters/syllables was used as opposed to total words for the Spanish and Russian data.…”

“…The word count included target language words and English proper nouns appropriate for use in the target language, while other English words, filled pauses, false starts, repetitions, and words contained in repairs outside of the final repaired construction were excluded. For the Mandarin data, number of total characters/syllables was used instead of words (see Du, , for the explanation). A second researcher then verified all codes and counts.…”

“…Using these specific fluency measures and a pretest and posttest design, researchers have reported statistically significant gains in L2 fluency after a semester abroad among American learners of French (Freed, ; Freed et al., ), Spanish (O'Brien et al., ; Segalowitz & Freed, ) and Mandarin (Du, ). Fluency measures that have been shown to significantly increase for learners after a sojourn abroad include speech rate (D'Amico, ; Du, ; Llanes & Muñoz, ; Segalowitz & Freed, ; Towell et al., ), longest run without unfilled or filled pauses (Llanes & Muñoz, ; Segalowitz & Freed, ), mean length of run without filled pauses (Segalowitz & Freed, ), mean length of run without unfilled pauses (D'Amico, ; Towell et al., ), repair rate (D'Amico, ), and number of words in the longest turn (Du, ; Segalowitz & Freed, ).…”

“…Oral fluency is one area in which researchers have documented gains by study abroad learners after sojourns overseas (Du, ), including greater fluency gains than comparable groups of language learners at a home institution (Freed, Segalowitz, & Dewey, ; Segalowitz & Freed, ). However, research on fluency and study abroad has received a substantive amount of criticism in recent years because of its failure to capture the complex individual experiences of study abroad learners (Kinginger, ).…”

Peer Socialization into Gendered L2 Mandarin Practices in a Study Abroad Context: Talk in the Dorm

“…It is estimated that there are over fifty programs for American college students in China (Du 2013). In a preliminary analysis of twenty-seven of them, twelve (44.44%) reportedly offer the students the opportunity to live with a Chinese roommate, constituting the most typical living arrangement with the local people for American students in China (Diao 2013).…”