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.
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.
