Academic Chinese: From Corpora to Language Teaching

The past several decades of research in Chinese applied linguistics have seen rapid developments in corpus infrastructure building and exploitation. However, one area in which systematic research is still lacking involves academic Chinese. In this chapter, we describe the construction of written academic Chinese corpora at the National Taiwan Normal University and University of California, Los Angeles and report preliminary results of research based on these corpora as well as their pedagogical applications in developing teaching materials for advanced Chinese language learning. Theoretical and practical issues in academic Chinese and the role of corpora in academic language pedagogy are discussed.