Recent initiatives in second language education incorporate goals of learning content and culture and assume that they will be integrated with language learning. But research shows that integration is problematic, and that it must therefore, be adequately assessed to guide future work. We describe an approach to the systematic assessment of integration based on knowledge structures and informed by systemic functional linguistics and ethnography. This has been applied in English. Can it be extended to Chinese? Using the data of student writing in an elementary Mandarin course, we illustrate how knowledge structures can bridge language and culture and can offer an analysis of groupings of lexical and grammatical features of Mandarin discourse. Since ethnographers have claimed that certain knowledge structures are cross-cultural, there are important implications for future research in integrative assessment in other languages and cultures.
This paper presents a qualitative study of a Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language and culture class for basic-level elementary anglophone students, where Chinese culture is a major part of the course content. Students learn Mandarin and learn about Chinese culture using Mandarin to do so. The paper explores issues of the assessment of language and content integration through an analysis of student writing, examining relations of form and meaning in discourse. Our approach is strongly influenced by systemic functional linguistics and by ethnography .