Research project

Aligning A-Level Mandarin Chinese to the Common European Framework of Reference CEFR

Project overview

Learning Mandarin Chinese is strategically important for the current and future generations of UK students (British Council, 2017). Along with the emerging recognition of the importance of grasping a modern foreign language in the post-Brexit era, there is a lack of understanding of how Chinese as a foreign language is aligned to a common benchmark of proficiency and how best to integrate the teaching, learning and assessment of Mandarin into foreign language curricula at post-secondary school level in the UK.

We will conduct a systematic investigation into the alignment of A-level Mandarin Chinese to the Common European Framework of Reference, using focus group interviews, quantitative standard setting exercises and corpus-based linguistic analyses. This research has the potential to link UK initiatives with the global teaching of modern foreign languages, including Mandarin Chinese, and to help develop shared international understanding of standards and proficiency levels.

Staff

Lead researchers

Dr Ying Zheng PhD

Associate Professor

Research interests

  • Psychometrics and test validation; Human scoring vs. machine scoring; Statistics in applied linguistics; Comparative Judgement in language testing
  • Mandarin exams in the UK school system, including A-Level and GCSE exams; Mandarin Chinese teachers’ professional development
  • Learner motivation and language teaching pedagogy; ESL/EFL learner characteristics and test performance
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Other researchers

Professor Roumyana Slabakova

Chair in Applied Linguistics

Research interests

  • Generative linguistic theory and the second language (L2) acquisition
  • Acquisition of grammatical structure and its interaction with meaning
  • Online and offline psycholinguistic methodologies
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Collaborating research institutes, centres and groups

Research outputs