Research On The Development Of American Students Spoken Chinese Ability From The Perspective Of Dynamic System Theory

The development of spoken Chinese has been a focus of research in the field of Chinese as a Foreign Language.Second language oral proficiency is a multi-dimension skill formed of complexity,accuracy,and fluency(CAF).These three dimensions together form a more comprehensive measurement of learner’s oral proficiency.However,as a consequence of oral proficiency functioning as a dynamic system,oral proficiency develops both non-linearly and is also more easily influenced by a variety of other variables.Taken together with the fact that learners will have different goals as they progress toward language proficiency,even examining a single individual or examining one of the three dimensions of CAF reveals a variety of different developmental paths.On the basis of Dynamic Systems Theory,this paper examines the development of 6 intermediate and 6 advanced American students’ oral Chinese proficiency,all of whom are studying in an immersive Chinese environment.Audio files were collected over the course of one semester and four observations.Praat was used to measure each audio file’s length,mark any pause in excess of 0.3 seconds,and calculate the frequency of pauses,repetitions,error correction,and linguistic errors.Additionally,all audio files were transcribed in order to calculate the lexical difficulty,density,and diversity of each subject’s produced vocabulary.Furthermore,each subject filled out a Language Contact Profile in order to better understand the characteristics of each individual’s language contact.According to the statistical data collected,the developmental patterns of American study abroad student’s oral Chinese CAF were compared,and on the basis of each subject’s language developmental characteristics were classified into three types of learners: cautious,risk taker,and comprehensive development.Overall,the results of this research demonstrate that intermediate-level Chinese learners made significant progress in terms of vocabulary,syntactic accuracy,lexicalvariety,average length of the AS-Unit,and speed of speech.In contrast,advanced-level Chinese learners made significant progress in terms of lexical diversity,lexical density,and average length of the AS-Unit.However,despite these overall trends,variance between individuals within each Chinese level cannot be ignored due to the fact that even slight variance becomes significant variance in the long term.This empirical study combines dynamic system’s theory with second language acquisition in order to analyze the development of Chinese oral ability and then categorize the different learning patterns into succinct groups.The goal of this research is to help Chinese language teachers adjust their teaching methodology according to the real situations of their students.This research demonstrates that Chinese language teachers should increase their use of chunking and practice exercises,placing more emphasis on students oral-output practice,while at the same time being sensitive to student’s psychological situation.In order to best arouse student’s enthusiasm,teachers should adjust their teaching method according to whichever stage students are currently in.