Events
Faculty of Arts: Colloquium Talk (Term 1, 2015-16) – Professor Zhang Yanhui and Dr. Wu Weiping on Spoken Chinese Learner Corpus: Construction and Language Learning Research
13 Nov 2015
4 – 6 pm
G24, Arts and Humanities Hub, G/F, Fung King Hey Building
Professor Zhang Yanhui Department of Linguistics andModern LanguagesDr. Wu WeipingYale-China Chinese Language Centre
Tel: 3943 7107 (Ms. Sonia Yip)
Designed by the Centre for Applied Linguistics in the United States and further developed by the Yale-China Chinese Language Centre, the Computerized Oral Proficiency Assessment (COPA) is a computer-based test system assessing the usage-based language proficiency for learners of Chinese. This talk will introduce the overall structure and current status of learner corpora, the designing principles of COPA, the construction of COPA-based corpora, and a word learning research study developed from the learner corpus. The study investigates learners’ awareness of the prosodic-morphological structures of Chinese compound nouns from the perspective of neologism (words created by learners). The findings suggest that most intermediate and advanced learners have acquired the structural knowledge to coin prosodically legitimate words, but still need sharper morphological awareness to create semantically legitimate words. By identifying the trajectory of learners’ word development, the study is expected to provide more insights for effective Chinese instruction.
