A Case Study Of Chinese Oral Competence Of Elementary Chinese Heritage Students In The United States

The group of Chinese heritage students currently has raised the concern from teachers and scholars in the field of teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages. Especially in the United States, quite a few universities and colleges have initiated Chinese heritage track courses for those Chinese heritage students. The research on the elementary level Chinese heritage students remains blank, though some researches about this group have appeared since two decades ago. Heritage students leave us a stereotype that they are able to speak but with no literacy. However, I find that their ability to speak should be redefined, when came to teach them personally. My findings reverses the notion that reading and wirting weigh heavily on teaching Chinese to heritage students, leaving out listening and speaking. To which level elementary Chinese students’oral competence is? What the differences are compared with non-heritage students? What kinds of tasks or topic they are able to deal with in Chinese? How the accuracy, comlexity and fluency are in their expressions? All above composes the intentions and aims of this study.I went to the University of Oregon,USA to teach Chinese last year.Therefore, I took advantage of my teaching experience and the heritage students I taught as my research objects. The research method:case study is adapted to investigate their Chinese language competence qualitatively and quantitatively. All the research materials are collected from the audio and video recordings during their five oral interviews, and then converted into written text. Based on Bachman’s Linguistic Competence Model and ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines, the research measures the students’ oral competence in the aspects of task/functions, content/context, accuracy and text type. The accomplishment of the language tasks and the length of their oral output in different topics are counted and described. The quality and quantity of their oral output in the level of speaking speed, phonetics, lexis, syntax, semantics and communicative strategies are examined through statistics and error analysis.This study finds out that the oral proficiency of the elementary Chinese heritage students has reached the intermediate level according to various standards, with some of them approaching the advanced level. Their pragmatic competence allows them to deal with intermediate level language tasks, and to handle daily life topics freely, but their performance decreases when faced with general and abstract content. Their expressions of intermediate level tasks last for quite a while and are on sentence level, but with few cohesion and coherence. As for the accuracy, complexity and fluency, they are greatly influenced by their mother tongue. The error frequently occurs due to the difference between their mother tongue and Chinese Mandarin. Meanwhile, they do have a huge storage of vocabulary, and could utilize colloquial fillers in conversation flexibly. But they lack the acquisition of grammar patterns, and tend to use very basic simple sentences. Various communicative strategies are applied in conversations. Some of them are able to speak as fast and fluent as the native Chinese speakers. And hesitations still remain for others.