Pre Conference Event, on the screen to the right Dr. Rebecca Oxford being interviewed Attending conferences is a great way to share your research with a wider audience, meet other researchers and PhD students, and learn scientific discussion. That is what I learned this week while attending my first international conference! Plenary speech by Dr. Gary Barkhuizen on emotional rexlexivity Submitting an abstract Each conference has its requirements, so check them carefully before preparing, and submitting your abstract. As a PhD student, you can usually give a paper presentation (a talk with p ..read more

My first year as a doctoral researcher is now behind me and it is time to look back on what I achieved in 2023. If you want to read more about my first semester, check out my review of Spring 2023 here. My Ph.D. courses I applied to university pedagogy courses, but they are very popular and I was not chosen this time, therefore I didn’t have any courses this semester. In hindsight, that was probably for the best as I was very busy with both work and my research. My research Autumn 2023 was a very important semester for my research, as I finished data collection for both substudy 1 and su ..read more

As I am conducting my Ph.D. research on Chinese language learning motivation, I am also looking back on my journey of learning the language. I believe that being an L2 speaker of Chinese myself, I can have a unique lens into learning, teaching, and researching Mandarin. I feel that with the cooperation of both native and non-native teachers and researchers, we can together paint a comprehensive picture of what it is like to learn Chinese. My first memory of being interested in the Chinese language and culture is from primary school, when we had to do notebook presentations by designing a poste ..read more

Me and my daughter during my Master’s graduation ceremony in 2016 What makes an exceptional language learner and how can we achieve native like fluency? Late 2022 a book was published on the topic of motivation, cognition and identity with a title “Lessons from Exceptional Language Learners Who Have Achieved Nativelike Proficiency” by Zoltán Dörnyei and Katarina Mentzelopoulos. They interviewed 30 participants that had achieved nativelike fluency in a foreign language as adults. Through analyzing the interview data, they categorized different variables explaining why these learners had achiev ..read more

After listening to an interesting podcast episode by David Moser in a discussion with Matthew Coss about handwriting Chinese characters and whether students should be expected to learn handwriting, I’m interested in continuing this discussion as a Chinese language learner, teacher, and Ph.D. researcher. My own current research focuses on learning motivation, but learning characters is also an important element in the complex topic of motivation. Perceived difficulty in the Chinese language definitely affects learning motivation. Two of the most difficult aspects of the language that students ..read more

My first semester as a doctoral researcher is almost finished, and it’s time to look back at what I have done and learned during this Spring. As I’m not really a student, the meaning of a semester isn’t as important as when I did my Bachelor’s or Master’s degrees, but nevertheless, I enjoy doing some reflection every six months or so. My year started with an online meeting with my two supervisors, followed by my supervisor’s seminar where I introduced my plans. My goal was to finish three courses, get started with my systematic review, and plan for data gathering to begin in September. In thi ..read more

As a Mandarin Chinese language teacher, I always strive to help my students reach their goals and succeed in their studies. There are countless variables that contribute to their success, or sometimes failure, in learning the language. According to research, and my personal observation as a teacher for the past 8 years, motivation is an essential key in unlocking mastery of a foreign language. When a student stops learning Chinese, and I’m talking about adult learners outside of the university context, they often can find a list of reasons for doing so: not having enough time, the language b ..read more

New video is published on my YouTube Channel! This time I shoot a video of our home, and an old Chinese house in the village. Most foreigners I know in the city live in rather fancy apartments in the city center or at least comfortable places along the Pearl River. Our family home is something totally different! The Ling Clan has lived in this village for the past 700 years, that time they fled the war in the Fujian district and decided to settle on an island where it was safe, just 20 kilometers from the Guangzhou city center. Back in 2013, I wrote on the blog how we planned to start the cl ..read more

I’m officially starting my Ph.D. studies in January, but before that and at the beginning of my studies, there is quite a lot of paperwork and administration to be done. As I have mentioned before, I always enjoy writing about my studies and I wish to document these first steps of my Ph.D. as well. I have also seen blog writing being used in research writing courses as one tool to improve your writing skills, the more you write, the better you can get! And being a non-native English speaker doing my research in English, I definitely hope to improve my language skills as well. Verification of ..read more

I have started to build my own professional Youtube channel about learning and teaching, researching study motivation, and living in China. So far I have uploaded a couple of older interviews, how I prepared for the HSK Advanced exam, a tour to my roots in Beijing, and sharing my language learning journey. I will be publishing new videos irregularly, so subscribe to get notifications when new videos are up. In 2020 I experimented with a Youtube channel but didn’t take into account that the videos we were doing all took half a day to shoot and full two days to edit. When work got busier again ..read more