Essay Writing in a Mandarin Chinese WebCT Discussion Board

Abstract: This article reports on a classroom-based study on the use of a Mandarin Chinese WebCT discussion board to support essay writing in a second-year Chinese language class consisting of mostly heritage learners at a midwestern U.S. university. The researcher describes the design and the implementation of essay writing and evaluates its effectiveness. The results indicate that essay writing in the Chinese WebCT discussion board is effective in terms of creating a supportive learning community among diverse Chinese language learners and being instrumental in students' Chinese language acquisition. Key words: community-building, computer-mediated communication, essay writing, heritage language learners, WebCT discussion board Language: Chinese (Mandarin) (ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) Although recent years have seen an increasing number of heritage learners in language classrooms, little research has been done on the interaction and collaboration between heritage and nonheritage learners, especially when the two groups of learners are placed in the same language classrooms. Given the complex definitions of heritage language learners, the instruction of heritage language learners is not easy or simple. Common practice is offering separate tracks for heritage and nonheritage learners, based mainly on their language proficiency levels. However, the social, cultural, and historical dimensions and perspectives that heritage language learners usually bring to the target language instruction may enrich and expand the nonheritage learners' learning of the target language. Therefore, it is worth investigating the possible advantages of mixing heritage and nonheritage learners in the same classroom, and the effective pedagogical practices that may work for both groups of learners. This article explores the pedagogical design of essay writing in Mandarin ChineseWebCT and essay writing's effectiveness in building a learning community in one college-level intermediate Mandarin Chinese class at a university in the midwestern United States, where nonheritage and heritage language learners of various backgrounds and proficiency levels are mixed in one classroom. The study aims to fill the void in the research literature on computer-assisted Chinese writing pedagogy, writing instruction for heritage language learners, and classroom essay writing for the purpose of community-building. While a wealth of research in writing instruction in English composition, English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL), and other commonly taught languages (see, for example, Thorson, 2000) already exists, little research has been conducted on writing instruction for Mandarin Chinese as a second and foreign language (CSL/CFL) at either a theoretical or practical level. In fact, Chinese writing instruction is one of the least researched issues in the CSL/CFL field. A recent search for literature on Chinese writing/composition in the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association (1966-2007) reveals few articles on the pedagogy of teaching writing except from Hong (1998), who reported an empirical study of Chinese business writing, and Mou (2003), who shared her experimental experiences in incorporating writing into a regular first-year Chinese classroom. As far as Chinese writing is concerned, what has received the most attention is how to teach students to write Chinese characters and whether the learners should hand-write Chinese characters or use computers to type Chinese characters. Hand-writing Chinese characters has been said to be the biggest hindrance to Chinese language learners, and the challenge of writing characters prevents many Chinese language learners from moving beyond introductory learning (Xu & Jen, 2005). If the writing of Chinese characters alone has been difficult for learners, developing writing skills in Chinese seems to be even more challenging. To accelerate Chinese language learners' writing skill development, Kubler (2002) suggested a computer-assisted approach to Chinese composition, which has been used increasingly frequently in China itself. …