A scoping review of learning Chinese as a second language

In the past years, scientific research on learning Chinese as a second language (CSL) has grown substantially. To guide future theoretical development and research directions, this scoping review sought to identify 1) the emerging research themes, 2) the characteristics of the CSL learners, and 3) the key findings in existing CSL studies.

Based on pre-determined inclusion criteria, we conducted a comprehensive search in major English and Chinese article databases (e.g., China National Knowledge Infrastructure and ERIC) and 16 previous reviews (e.g., Ke, 2020). A total of 10,239 articles were found between 1992 (the earliest time we could find a record) and October 2022, with 2,641 after removing duplicates. We screened these records by titles and abstracts (618 articles left) and then by full papers, leading to the 290 articles in our final pool. Each article was coded, and the data were analyzed.

Our major findings include that most articles (91.0%) were published after 2010, and fall into the disciplines of education, psychology, and linguistics (94.5%), with reading comprehension being one of the emerging research themes. Moreover, most CSL learners were from English-speaking countries and learned Chinese in Mainland China; some studies (36.6%) focused on learners at the elementary and intermediate levels of Chinese, and only 8.9% of studies concentrated on children (younger than 12 years).

The findings clarify what we have known in scientific research on CSL in the past three decades, and point out the future directions for theoretical development and empirical studies to better prompt second language education. Copyright © 2023 by Association for Reading and Writing in Asia.