A preliminary analysis of the effects of listener-speaker and speaker-listener sequences on learning Chinese as a foreign language

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of different instructional sequences when learning Chinese as a foreign language. Six English-speaking individuals (two male adults, three female adults, and one male student) participated in this study. Combined listener instruction consisted of auditory-visual matching for textual stimuli (i.e., “Point to [name of Chinese character]) and visual-visual matching for textual and picture stimuli (i.e., “Match [name of Chinese character]). Combined speaker instruction consisted of textual and tacting responding in Chinese. The researcher taught six stimulus sets (a total of 30 Chinese vocabularies), with each set randomly assigned to either the Listener-Speaker or Speaker-Listener instructional sequence. Results indicated that four participants required fewer trials to criterion with Speaker-Listener instruction; the other two participants’ learning trials between the two instructional methods were comparable. Five participants demonstrated greater emergent listener responses for stimulus sets taught with combined speaker instruction than emergent speaker responses for stimulus sets taught with combined listener instruction. One participant’s emergent speaker and listener responses were at a high level and not differentiated between the two instructional methods.