Summer School on Empirical Research Methods in Chinese Linguistics and Chinese Language Teaching (only registered participants)

The summer school, which is mainly financed generously by Volkswagenstiftung and supported by AKI, Fachverband Chinesisch and ZeUS Göttingen, is directed at interested young scientists from the fields of Chinese Linguistics and Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language in the German-speaking world; it aims to introduce empirical research methods and theories from relevant disciplines (empirical educational research, foreign language didactics and sinolinguistics) and give participants the opportunity to discuss their own research projects with renowned experts in the respective disciplines, thus contributing to the establishment of the first, research-oriented network for the research on Chinese as a Foreign language.

The summer school program will be the first in German-speaking countries to offer an intensive training tailored to the special needs of the target group (Teaching Methodology in the context of German secondary schools). The concept of the four-day program entails a mix of theoretical input, individual development of scientific and methodological aspects as well as an exchange on the respective participants‘ research projects: Participants can profit from this innovative concept in that, apart from hearing presentations and taking part in interactive workshops on different methodological approaches, they will also be given the opportunity to present their own work in a research colloquium and discuss it with an international expert audience.

At the heart of the program are six workshops that serve as an introduction to different methods of empirical research as well as current debates in the field of Chinese as a Foreign Language. The workshops are planned in a way that allows for a maximum variety of qualitative and quantitative research methods:

• qualitative content analysis (Prof. Birgit Schädlich, Universität Göttingen)
• conversation analysis (Prof. Marta Garcia, Universität Göttingen)
• quantitative analysis: surveys and interviews (Prof. Ruth Albert, Universität Marburg)
• Usage-based Chinese language learning & teaching, corpus analysis (Prof. Zhuo Jing-Schmidt, University of Oregon, USA)
• Teaching Pedagogic Chinese Grammar and Learner’s Oral Production (Prof. LU Yang, University of Nottingham, UK)
• language standard and varieties in Chinese (Prof. Henning Klöter, Humboldt Universität Berlin)

Working language of the workshops will be German and English.