Learning Chinese as a foreign language: An introduction

In this introductory paper, we first present the background of the present special issue dedicated to Willis Edmondson. We first point out why Edmondson provided a ground-breaking contribution to the field of applied linguistics and why it is particularly timely to edit a special issue centering on his framework. We also argue that Edmondson's bottom-up and strictly language-anchored view on speech acts and interaction is particularly useful to examine the learning of Chinese as a foreign language, by going beyond exoticizing and overgeneralizing views of the Chinese linguaculture. Second, we briefly present what can be regarded as the heart and soul of the Edmondsonian framework, that is, a typology of speech acts and a related procedure through which the relationship between speech acts in interaction can be captured. Third, we present a research procedure that we outlined in our previous work, and which helps implementing the Edmondsonian model in the pragmatic study of foreign language learning. Finally, we present the contents of the special issue.