More than “Hello” and “Bye-bye”: opening and closing the online chats in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Reporting on a descriptive study on the first semester Chinese language learners' openings and closings in online chats with age-peer native speakers of Chinese, this paper demonstrates the great promise that telecollaboration holds for foreign language education, and argues for an increasing role of pragmatics in Chinese language instruction, and at the same time points out the limitations of the textbooks in providing ample examples of openings and closings in the dialogues to the learners. This paper is an initial attempt to address interlanguage pragmatic in Chinese which has been virtually not studied in the literature.

Keywords:

• telecollaboration
• conversational opening and closing
• Chinese as a foreign language