A corpus linguistics approach to the research and teaching of Chinese as a second language: The case of the ba -construction

This paper reports on the results of preliminary analyses of two corpora of learner Chinese that students produced during study abroad in China: A written corpus and a spoken corpus of longitudinal data. Several native language corpora were used as references. Results not only revealed that learners still underused the ba-construction, they also quantified the extent of the underuse. Additionally, findings from the longitudinal spoken corpus reveal that spending an entire year studying abroad in China can help students make progress in their production of the ba-construction. Pedagogically, it is suggested that teachers should consult native as well as learner corpora in developing teaching materials, and students should be encouraged to take learning into their own hands by consulting native corpora themselves, to engage in Data Driven Learning (DDL). This paper argues for the usefulness of corpus linguistics in the research and teaching of Chinese as a second language.