Song-stuck-in-my-head : acquisition of adjectival predicates for secondary school students learning Chinese as a second language through Mandarin songs

Abstract

The necessity of learning Chinese as a second language in Hong Kong is increasing as its increasing population of ethnic minority. However there is no centralised curriculum for students while the examiner report of IGCSE(0547) points out that platitudinous use of the character 是(is) is one of the most frequently made grammatical mistakes by candidates. A theoretical framework is generated to test students who learn Chinese as a second language could acquire adjectival predicate by listening to Mandarin songs with structured input activities. A quasi-experimental design and multiple case study were used in this research with 69 Hong Kong secondary school participated. After a fourweek intervention, it was found that students who listened to Mandarin pop songs with input processing activities showed improvement in the usage of adjectival predicate, also outperformed the control group and the other experimental group without input processing activities.