THE MANDARIN ORAL MASTERY PROGRAMME AS PERCEIVED BY NON-NATIVE LEARNERS

Background and Purpose: Pinyin is required in learning Mandarin. The challenge of Romanised Pinyin is that learners must decipher the meaning of words based on the change of tone. Communication research is often conducted without accounting for the effects of the change of tone in learning a language. With the aim of avoiding miscommunication while strengthening awareness, Campus Buddies Programme was employed to provide tone practice for learners and consequently explores the effectiveness of the intervention. Methodology: This quantitative classroom-based research gathered information through the administration of a questionnaire. The questionnaire was distributed to 32 Mandarin Level 1 learners identified through purposive sampling. The students studied five topics from the syllabus. A total of 10 native speakers who scored A in Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) mentored the learners during the programme. The participants were instructed to answer both pre- and post-tests. Part A consists of demographic details, whereas Part B focuses on the effectiveness of questions and Part C consists of 30 questions of content learned by the respondents. The data were then analysed using SPSS 26 software. Findings: The respondents demonstrated a positive response towards the programme and suggested further improvement ideas such as prolonging the training session and adding more topics and oral activities. The results implicated the programme as a motivator for oral fluency. Many non-native speakers can benefit from conversation with Mandarin native speakers because it is a strong indicator and sound oral mastery strategy. Contributions: This research provides insights into the effectiveness of the current programme in motivating students’ oral learning. The outcome is essential in determining the Mandarin conversation strategy. More studies adopting different variables are proposed to explore correlations from different perspectives in order to improve students’ oral learning. Keywords: Tonal pronunciation, native speakers, non-native speakers, foreign language instruction, Mandarin conversation. Cite as: Chua, N. A., Soon, G. Y., Ibrahim, M. Y., Che Noh, C. H., Mansor, N. R., Embong Eusoff, A. M., Abdul Rashid, R., & Shen, M. (2022). The Mandarin oral mastery programme as perceived by non-native learners. Journal of Nusantara Studies, 7(1), 1-23. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol7iss1pp1-23

Gestural repair in Mandarin conversation

Ever since Charles Goodwin’s seminal works on gaze, there has been a long-standing interest in Conversation Analysis in the interrelationship between talk and bodily conduct in the accomplishment of social action. Recently, a small but emerging body of research has explored the ways in which embodied conduct figures in the organization and operations of repair. In this article, I take up a similar theme and investigate the interaction between talk and iconic gestures in same-turn self-initiated repair in Mandarin conversation. The phenomenon I examine concerns the use of what I call “gestural repair.” The analysis focuses on how such repair can intertwine with talk in multi-stage operations in the progressivity and resolution of repair. The data are drawn from 50 hours of naturally-occurring conversations collected in China. Some unique features of such gestural repair observed in the Mandarin data are also discussed.

Semantic relations and prosodic features of ranhou in spontaneous Mandarin conversation

Ranhou ‘then’ is traditionally defined as a conjunction, indicating succession of two events. Adopting the methodology of Interactional Linguistics, this study explores semantic relations of ranhou in Mandarin face-to-face and telephone conversations. An examination of the data shows that besides succession, ranhou can express other nine semantic relations, including causality, progression relation, coordinating relation, adversative relation, additive relation, enumeration, hypothesis, alternative relation, concession and be no practical meaning as well. Meanwhile, prosodic features of ranhou are explored with the help of software Praat and Audacity. It is suggested that eleven semantic relations vary in mean pitch range and mean length. Although each token of ranhou differs from each other in prosody, with respect to loudness, ranhou can be stressed on ran, or hou and also be articulated without loudness. But in a whole, loudness of ranhou is mostly put on hou.

Collaborative construction of turn constructional units in responsive positions of question-answer sequences in Mandarin conversation

This paper explores the features and interactional functions of collaboratively constructed TCUs (CCTs) in responsive positions of question-answer sequences in Mandarin daily conversations. Adopting the methodologies of Conversation Analysis, Interactional Linguistics and Multimodal Analysis, the study explores the sequential features of the CCTs and bodily-visual resources co-occurring with the CCTs, such as gaze orientations and gestures. Two categories have been identified based on the participants’ roles in the question-answer sequences. First, the answerer initiates the response to the question, and the questioner collaboratively completes the response. The analysis shows that the questioners are not conveying the action of answering the question but assuming the answer to the question. Second, one answerer initiates the response to the question, and another one collaboratively completes the response. The data demonstrates that this type of CCTs usually involves the two question-recipients with more or less equal epistemic access to the referent.

Collaborative assessments in Mandarin conversation

The co-production of a sentence is a phenomenon that is widely observed in talk-in-interaction across languages. However, with a few notable exceptions, there is still much room for the investigation of how the co-production of sentences is put to the service of specific actions and activities in different language communities. This paper, using 10 hours of video-recorded data, examines the co-production of assessments (“collaborative assessments”) in Mandarin conversation. It is found that speakers can use syntactic, prosodic, and bodily-visual devices to realize assessment collaboration, and that the functions of collaborative assessment include (1) helping provide a candidate assessment term and facilitating the assessment; (2) articulating/specifying ‘vague’ assessments; (3) helping complete the foreshadowing of a negative assessment term; and (4) co-participation in the assessment activity. This paper also discusses the design features of co-completion and subsequent responses on the basis of the continuum of speakers’ epistemic authority and agency in collaborative assessment sequences and concludes with some implications of this study for grammar as practice.

The question-response system in Mandarin conversation

This article provides an overview of the question-response system in Mandarin Chinese from a conversation analytic perspective. Based on 403 question-response sequences from natural conversations, this study discusses the grammatical coding of Mandarin questions, social actions accomplished by questions, and formats of responses. It documents three grammatical types of questions, that is, polar questions (including sub-types), Q-word questions, and alternative questions. These questions are shown to perform a range of social actions, confirmation request being the most frequent. Also, this article reveals that the preferred format for confirming polar answers is interjection, while that for disconfirming polar answers is repetition. It provides a starting point for future studies on Mandarin questions and responses as well as a reference point for further crosslinguistic comparison.

IMPROVING BASIC LEVEL MANDARIN CONVERSATION SKILLS THROUGH THE PICTURE AND PICTURE METHOD FOR STUDENTS - PRIVATE HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS DHARMA PANCASILA MEDAN

Along with the times and the demands of industry 4.0, strict technological, economic, social, and cultural developments make every country compete, and everything becomes very easy to access. For this reason, building human resources that are hard-working, dynamic, skilled, and mastering science and technology is necessary to invite talents from other countries to cooperate with Indonesia. Currently, Indonesia has collaborated with other countries, one of which is China. Therefore, in this community service activity, efforts will be made to improve Mandarin's conversational skills through the picture to picture method. This activity has been carried out online through zoom meetings. The number of students who took part in this activity was 20 students of SMA Dharma Pancasila. In its implementation, the picture and picture method approach is used with materials from power points that have been optimized by the service team and specifically for high school students. This community service has resulted in the outcome, namely assistance in improving Chinese conversations, which impacts improving students' Mandarin language skills

Overlapping as final-item completion in Mandarin conversation

This study locates as its focus the site for the final item in a sentence-in-progress as a late but systematic opportunity space for co-completing sentences by another speaker, and as a systematic site for brief overlaps. A second speaker may supply a version of the final item as projected by the grammatical structure of the sentence-so-far in given contexts to offer assistance for the searched-for final item upon the current speaker’s displayed delivery trouble, or to show an early recognition of what the current turn is doing and what it takes for its completion in the absence of any display of delivery trouble. The overlap in the first case may be ‘accidental’ when the first speaker is able to produce his/her own final item a moment later, or it may be an ‘achieved’ early start in the second case. The same opportunity space may also be ‘exploited’. Final items proposed by the second speaker may generate a local sequence where its acceptability becomes relevant. Post-overlap responses by the first speaker often show acceptance, sometimes with qualification. We argue that overlapping final-item completion is a result of speakers’ active participation and high involvement, and is motivated by the fundamental baseline of cooperation and collaboration in human social interaction.