ABSTRACT
The place of grammar instruction has been a controversial topic among Second Language Acquisition (SLA) researchers and language teachers. This lack of consensus on grammar instruction has posed many challenges for teachers in the field of teaching Chinese as a second (or foreign) language, because the resources in this new field are scarcer.
This chapter begins with an overview of the form-focused and meaning-focused approaches in grammar instruction and also identifies the major difficulties found in these two approaches. Based on our recent survey of 178 CSL (Chinese as a second language) teachers worldwide, we then propose a method for teaching Chinese grammar that employs the concepts of frequency and cue salience in usage-based theory as general guidance for increasing input salience, coupled with the adoption of the PACE Model as a step-by-step procedure in conducting grammar lessons. For teaching materials, we created and employed 35 humorous dialogic stories to teach Chinese grammar at the college level, with each story highlighting a salient and frequently used grammatical pattern in Chinese (Li and Paul 2015). In this chapter, we will illustrate the procedure through our lesson on Chinese measure words and examine the characteristics of the four stages of the PACE model.
This chapter is especially helpful for CSL teachers who teach Chinese courses to high school or college students at the beginning and intermediate levels. It challenges teachers to examine their presuppositions about how to present grammar to L2 learners and to re-conceptualize their understanding of grammar teaching. It also provides specific actionable steps for classroom use that integrates the following three important components of grammar instruction identified by the worldwide CSL teachers in a recent survey: the use of abundant comprehensible L2 input, the means for form-meaning mapping, and the opportunity to produce meaningful output.
