Research in the field of Chinese linguistics has revealed the inherent mechanisms and
specifications of the language from a typological and cross-linguistic point of view. Chinese
belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family (Sun 2006). Compared with Indo-European
languages such as English, Chinese has minimal morphological changes, but it has a rich
tonal system and a sophisticated writing system. Chinese is also an analytic language, in
which “grammatical relationships were shown either by word order or by the use of
independent grammatical particles, rather than by affixes or by internal changes in the word
itself” (Norman 1988, p. 10). Chinese linguists have investigated the kinds of knowledge
CFL learners acquire and how that knowledge compares to that of their native languate (also
called the first language or L1) or other additional languages. In fact, early research on CFL
in the 1980s and 1990s was primarily based on knowledge of Chinese linguistics and the
assumption that learning a foreign language is no different from learning one’s native tongue
(cf. Zhu 2010 for a historical review of CFL teaching). It was thought that teaching learners
how the Chinese language works would prepare them to function in a Chinese-speaking
community (Zhu 2010). Although this notion has been proven inadequate (cf. Zhu