Date of Award

1-1-2016

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of Education Theory and Practice

Content Description

1 online resource (viii, 107 pages)

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Istvan Kecskes

Committee Members

James Hargett, Carlotta Sparvoli

Keywords

Chinese as foreign language teaching, Curriculum development, Developing Pragmatic competence in second language, Pragmatic awareness in second language, Situation-Bound Utterances, Teaching Chinese as a Second Language, Chinese language, Implicit learning, Context (Linguistics), Conversation analysis

Subject Categories

Education | Linguistics

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the teachability of Situation-Bound Utterances (SBUs hence) in a Modern Chinese foreign language classroom. Specifically, the basic question to be examined is this: to what extent two instructional paradigms--explicit versus implicit instruction--affect learners’ knowledge and ability to use SBUs. For this study, SBUs were defined by Kecskés (2000) as “highly conventionalized, prefabricated pragmatic units whose occurrences are tied to standardized communicative situations” (p. 606). SBUs consist of strings such as “I’ll see you later,” and “You can say that again,” which are used predictably by native speakers in certain contexts.

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