The Halved Exposure to Chinese Language Environmen...
As L2 learners are defined as school learners of Chinese language(Orton，2016:10)，their best opportunity of exposing to authentic Chinese language and to practice using Chinese language is in the classroom.Unfortunately，the study design already presents a halved opportunity for L2 users to expose to a Chinese speaking environment.Although VCE Chinese LCS follows the standard 200-hour instruction time as other language courses，the medium language used in the classroom，as well as for the assessment，are both English and Chinese.The using of English is also opposite to Orton’s initial recommendation，“needs to be greater encouragement for schools to establish more productive programs providing intensive learning opportunities in terms of frequency per week(three to five one-hour lessons)and immersion(mostly no English)style”(Orton，2016:97).
This design seems compromise the language teaching for the purpose of including cultural component.Even culture is a significant variable that contributes to the success of language study(Byram and Morgan，1994)，the effect can only be recognised by language learners after being exposed to the language for a sufficient period of time(Moran，2001).Due to the inherent difficulty of learning Chinese，it requires a much greater time commitment in order to achieve proficiency than European languages and Asian language(Moore et al.，1992;Orton，2008;Lo Bianco，2009;Sturak and Naughten，2010;Department of Education and Early Childhood Development，2011).The 1992 Doge Initiative compared Chinese with the popular European language subject French as the reference.The report shows that to reach the same proficiency level，the estimated time for students learning Chinese is 1，320 hours，almost triple the time required compared to the required time for French students，480 hours(Moore et al.，1992).In the 2008 report，Orton referred data from the Foreign Service Institute in Washington DC，which estimates native English-speaking learners need approximately 2 200 hours to become proficient in Chinese，3.7 times of that of learning French(approximately 600 hours in total).
Therefore，it is almost straightforward to conclude that taking the same 200-hour standard instruction hours as all other language courses，VCE Chinese students can only expect to achieve much lower language proficiency level than their European learner counterparts.On top of that，the halved Chinese language exposure opportunity has the potential to further undermine their linguistic achievement at graduation.