CCLE Talk Series: Dr. Kuo-ming Sung and The Importance of Linguistic Research for Writing Language Textbooks
CCLE Author
November 30, 2022
Workshop Report
One of the goals of the CCLE is to enhance teachers’ teaching skills. As such, a workshop on pedagogy research and student learning was held online on November 30, 2022. We were honored to invite Dr. Kuo-ming Sung to host a speech on how to apply new linguistic research findings to L2 grammar teaching and learning. This workshop was done in collaboration with the East Asian Languages and Literatures (EALL) department at UHM.
Kuo-ming Sung
Wendy and K.K. Tse Professor of East Asian Studies Professor of Chinese and Linguistics at Lawrence University, WI
Dr. Sung received a Ph.D. in Romance Linguistics from UCLA in 1994 and then joined Lawrence University in Wisconsin, where he teaches linguistic theory and Chinese. He is currently the chair professor and head of the Department of Chinese and Japanese and the director of the Linguistics Program at the school. Dr. Sung’s main research area is the syntactic structure of Romance languages and East Asian languages, as well as the teaching of Chinese and Tibetan grammar. His works include “A Reference Grammar for Teaching Chinese: Syntax and Discourse” co-authored with Professor Cui Songren (2022, jointly published by Springer Nature and Peking University Press), “Amdo Tibetan: A Comprehensive Grammar Textbook” (2021, Routledge Press), “Colloquial Amdo Tibetan” (2005, China Tibetology Press), “Introduction to Syntactic Theories” (1997, China Social Science Press, third edition in 2015) and other books.
The workshop was extremely well-received by the audience. Around 30 audience members attended including professors, editors of the current publishing version, experienced off-campus instructors, and GAs from a variety of departments. Inspired, they all agreed that linguistics research plays an important role in language teaching and textbook compilation. It also implies to be vital that the instructor receive professional training and be able to clearly provide pragmatics, functions, and forms of language features to students.
Highlights of the Topic
“Integrated Chinese” is the most widely used Mandarin teaching material in the United States. However, there are some unclear or arbitrary explanations of grammar in this series of teaching materials. Generally, there are 4 types of grammar illustration problems as below:
For English-background learners, there are lots of unique concepts in Mandarin syntax, semantics, and pragmatics which do not exist in English, as well as some shared concepts rooted in English native speakers’ subconscious. Thus, the research outcomes of modern linguistics play important roles. Learners are unable to learn these new concepts by themselves, therefore, sharing this language knowledge becomes a necessary task of Mandarin teachers and of the fundamental criteria for writing language teaching materials.