Speaker: Dr Wu Weiping (Department of Linguistics & Modern Languages) and Prof. Zhang Yanhui (Yale-China Chinese Language Centre)
| Date: | 11 November 2015 (Fri) |
| Time: | 4:00pm |
| Venue: | G24, Arts and Humanities Hub, Fung King Hey Building, CUHK |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | Designed by the Centre for Applied Linguistics in the United States and further developed by the Yale-China ChineseLanguage Centre, the Computerized Oral Proficiency Assessment (COPA) is a computer-based test system assessing the usage-based language proficiency for learners of Chinese. This talk introduced the overall structure and current status of learner corpora, the designing principles of COPA, the construction of COPA-based corpora, and a word learning research study developed from the learner corpus. The study investigated learners’ awareness of the prosodic-morphological structures of Chinese compound nouns from the perspective of neologism (words created by learners). The findings suggested that most intermediate and advanced learners had acquired the structural knowledge to coin prosodically legitimate words, but still needed sharper morphological awareness to create semantically legitimate words. By identifying the trajectory of learners' word development, the study was expected to provide more insights for effective Chinese instruction. Dr Wu introduced the Spoken Chinese Oral Proficiency Assessment and the process of creating the database on oral production by spoken Chinese for the lanuage acquisition corpus. He concluded that language acquistion could be studied from a horizontial as well as a vertical view and by foucsing on the language use/ structure and cross-cultural comparison. Professor Zhang talked about the analysis of the learner corpora obtained from the database by using tools such as error tagging, morpheme tagging and shared her research result with audience. |
