The Third Space and Chinese Language Pedagogy

The Third Space and Chinese Language Pedagogy presents the Third Space as a new frame through which foreign language pedagogy is conceptualized as a pedagogy of negotiating intentions and expectations in another culture.

The field of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) in the past decades has been expanding rapidly at the beginning and intermediate levels, yet it is lacking in scholarship on the true advanced level both in theory building and research-supported curriculum and material development. This book argues that it is time for CFL to go beyond merely satisfying the desire of gazing at the other, whether it is curiosity about the other or superiority over the other, to focusing on learning to work with the other. It reimagines the field as co-constructing a transcultural Third Space where learners are becoming experts in negotiating intentions and expectations in another culture. It presents a range of research-based CFL pedagogical scholarship and practices especially relevant to the advanced level and to the goal of enabling learners to go past fans or critics to become actors/players in the game of cross-lingual and intercultural cooperation.

Xin Zhang is an assistant professor of Chinese language and intercultural communication and Co-director of the Third Space Lab at Duke Kunshan University, where she coordinates the Chinese as a Second Language program. Her research interests center around second language acquisition, Chinese language pedagogy and intercultural communication manifested in language teaching, program building and teacher training. She is the co-author of Perform Guangzhou: A Course in Intermediate to Advanced Spoken Mandarin.

Xiaobin Jian is an associate professor of Chinese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University. He specializes in language pedagogy, negotiation and presentation in cross-lingual and cross-cultural context, program design and material development aiming at training non-native learners at the true advanced level in domain-specific and culturally authentic context. In addition to publishing articles on early Chinese tradition and contemporary Chinese behavioral culture, he is the author/co-author of the five-volume Kaleidoscope series and the multi-volume Perform China series (two volumes published with two more volumes forthcoming and several more in planning).