This course examines Chinese language teaching through integrated psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives, focusing on how learners’ cognitive processing, identities, social positioning, and educational contexts shape language learning outcomes. Rather than treating learning difficulties as purely linguistic errors, the course emphasizes how issues such as heritage identity, pragmatic socialization, multilingual processing, literacy development, and assessment fairness emerge in real teaching settings.
Students will engage with empirical research on Chinese language acquisition and analyze concrete classroom cases involving diverse learner populations, including heritage learners, multilingual learners, and learners with potential reading or learning difficulties. Through guided discussion, cross-perspective analysis, and applied projects, students will learn to diagnose teaching challenges, connect them to both psychological mechanisms and social structures, and design theoretically informed instructional responses.
By the end of the course, students will be able to critically interpret psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research, apply these perspectives to real-world Chinese language teaching problems, and develop pedagogical solutions that are cognitively grounded, socially informed, and ethically responsible.