International Chinese Language Education in the Context of Third Language Acquisition: the Value, Connotation and Practical Approaches

Abstract

International Chinese language education has long been incorporated into the theoretical framework of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), while Chinese is being learned as a third language in most overseas countries. Introducing the theory of third language acquisition helps reveal the pattern of Chinese language acquisition for multilingual learners and promotes the further development of international Chinese language education.This paper reviews the history, content and current status of third language acquisition research and finds that there are three aspects of coupling between the pedagogical elements embedded in international Chinese education and the paradigm of third language acquisition: first, the cognitive advantage of multilingual learners promotes the transformation of instructional goals from perceptual to rational cognition; second, interlanguage transfer and affective strategy convergence prompt teaching approaches to expand from the theory of third language; third, constructing the model of third language acquisition can improve the explanatory power of second language teaching theory in international Chinese language education. This research points out that the introduction of third language acquisition can help build the teaching model that conforms to the cognitive laws of multilingual learners, and that it is necessary to develop specialized teaching materials that follow the rules of third language acquisition based on the model of “practice, evaluation, development”, to integrated teaching with language meaning, language form, and language use as content, and to developing multilingualist's multilingualism with a focus on commonality, distance and awareness of language.