Challenges Encountered by Chinese ESL Learners: Problems and Solutions from Complementary Perspectives

This book provides a blended approach in outlining the properties of grammatical knowledge that have been causing difficulty to Chinese speaking learners, including tense and aspect, articles, passives, unaccusatives, plurality and motion verbs. It explains from different linguistics perspectives how these constraints/difficulties might be dealt with. It also offers readers a comprehensive account of these problems, and outlines the possible pedagogical solutions teachers can try in the classroom. These topics are selected because they bring substantial challenges and difficulties to Chinese English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. This book bridges the gap between acquisition theory and language pedagogy research, benefiting not just language learners but language teachers around the world, and all those who would like to witness collaboration between second language acquisition theory and second language teaching practice in general. It initiates future work in which researchersfrom different fields with diverging theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches will be able to develop studies that are compatible with each other. This overall can facilitate our understanding of second language acquisition, and how instruction might help.  

Mable Chan (Ph.D., Language and Linguistics, The University of Essex, UK) is currently a Senior Lecturer at the Language Centre, Hong Kong Baptist University. Before joining Hong Kong Baptist University, she taught in the Department of English of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University for close to 20 years. Her main research interests include second language acquisition (SLA) at the interface with language education, and professional/workplace communication. She has published widely in the areas of second language acquisition, professional communication, and language learning and teaching in international journals such as System, Journal of Educational Research, and Business and Professional Communication Quarterly. She received the Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching twice (2004/2005; 2010/2011). She also secured key external grants from: University Grants Committee (GRF: $677,300), and Standing Committee of Language Education and Research ($882,286.9). She recently (January 2020) published an authored book entitled English for Business Communication with Routledge. There are two other books she is now working on: (a) an edited book entitled Perspectives on teaching workplace English in the 21st century with Routledge; and (b) an authored book entitled Teaching Business English with Routledge.  

Professor Alessandro Benati is Director of CAES at Hong Kong University. He is known for his research on how L2 learners process information and what internal strategies they use in language processing across romance and non-romance languages. Most recently his ground-breaking research on the pedagogical framework called Processing Instruction has been driven by the use of new online measurements (e.g., eye tracking, self-paced reading, reaction times) to track what happens within language learners' brains in learning contexts. He is author and co-author of several research monographs and journals articles in this field. Alessandro has coordinated high-impact research projects funded by the EU, Leverhulme Trust, British Academy, and other research bodies around the world. He is co-editor of a new series for Cambridge University Press called Elements in Second Language Acquisition,  a member of the UK-REF Panel 2021, and honorary professor in various institutions in Europe and the USA.