Chinese language maintenance: A case study of a weekend school

This is a case study of a community-based language school, which aims to maintain the Chinese language and culture by way of a variety of formal and semi-formal instructional activities. In this study, I have two general research questions, one is "what are the language maintenance efforts by this weekend school?" and the other is "how are the outcomes of these efforts?" To answer these questions, I have completed two tasks. One is an ethnographic description of the school, its growth through time, its instructional activities and the social and cultural context in which the school operates. The other task I have completed is the determination of the relationship between various social and instructional factors and the language proficiency that the target population has demonstrated. I finished the first task by providing detailed descriptions and narrations using qualitative data that I collected from my participant observation, which involved weekly trips to the field of research, interviews with and surveys from students, teachers and parents. I finished the second task by producing quantitative examinations and analyses of the data that I collected from a standardized language test and an examinee background information form. Among my major findings are, first, students' interest and motivation in attending language classes are low, so is their language proficiency, especially in reading comprehension and structure, as compared to available national norms. I argue that this is largely due to the traditional nature of the instructional methodologies and classroom activities. Second, I found the school is in need of more support and recognition from the community and society as a whole. Therefore, based on my findings, I concluded my dissertation with proposals to enhance the instructional design through a proficiency-based teaching approach, and to rally public support for the community effort through a credentializing system in which the weekend school students could receive appropriate regular high school credits.