Dear all!

Your second 15% assignment has been marked and ready for collection from Friday, 19 November 2009 onwards. These can be collected during office hours only outside the Department of Chinese Studies General office on level 3, AS7 – in a box sitting on top of staff pigeon boxes directly opposite the glass-door entrance (you know, where my pigeon box is when you came and submitted hard copies of your assignments).

If you can’t come to collect your work before the exam, that’d be fine, too. I’ll bring all the uncollected assignments on the day of the exam since the exam is going to be an open-book one, anyway.

Now for some comments on the assignments (in point form, though not necessarily in any given order of importance):

The amount of comments that I give you does not at all reflect the quality of your work! Sometimes I may feel it worthwhile to make a comment, other times I may decide not to make an individual remark and instead just make some general comments (as I am doing here). In fact, many of you will notice that I’ve not put down any comments except for the grade;

Not everyone sorted the sentences in exactly the same way, which is OK so long as (1) there is consistency in how you did the sorting, and (2) that there wasn't any outrageously wrong instances. After all, this is not a syntax module and I don’t expect you to be syntacticians to do this assignment well. No-one that I remembered did anything wildly wrong, so that’s great!

Having said the above, I did need you to be consistent with how you categorised sentences. If two sentences obviously belong to the same category (according to your criteria) and yet you had put them into different categories, then that would’ve affected your results. Examples of this included 过山洞的 ( 火车 ) and 晒衣服的 ( 竹竿 ) in FLA, among many other similar examples;

过山洞的 ( 火车 ) and 晒衣服的 ( 竹竿 ) are actually good examples of how you could/should have made use of what I said about a sentence with the potential of belonging to multiple categories. Sometimes a sentence might fall into multiplie categories because it can’t be decided which category de 的 comes under (due to the learner’s erroneous use etc.). Sometimes you do this because de 的 appears more than once in different places serving different functions a given sentence. Other times it’s because we just cannot say categorically that a sentences such as 过山洞的 ( 火车 ) or 晒衣服的 ( 竹竿 ) belongs to any one category i.e. it’s best to say that they probably can be seen as appearing under multiple categories (and this is a desirable thing to do). The fact is that, often owing to the learner’s innovative use of language, we can’t always be sure whether something belongs in one category or the other e.g. the confusion of word classes is one such example. And don’t forget that it’s not only FLA learners but SLA learners, too, who are capable of and do produce examples such as 过山洞的 ( 火车 ) or 晒衣服的 ( 竹竿 ). So it would’ve been to your advantage if you had put examples such as these under different categories;

Even though many of you did a wonderful job, no-one did an outstandingly excellent job, I have to say. The reason is that there wasn’t one individual who managed to cover all the relevant things that there are to say. Some of you focused more on, say, use and context, whilst others focused on types of errors etc. Of course these focuses are all intersesting and relevant, but the fact remains that no-one comprehensively covered everything.

I did actually mark this assignment more critically than any of the previous ones that you submitted. One of the reasons is that, this being your last assignment, it should have pretty much demonstrated all the knowledge and skills that you had learned in this module. I’ve been more or less lenient and generous with the grades that I gave to you all in previous assignments because I really wanted to do my best to encourage you all. Having said all this, I still want to reassure you that I am still a reasonable marker and, if I had a choice between a low A- and a high B+, I would not hesitate in awarding you the former.

If you have any question between now and the exam, you should email it to me in the first instance (and ALWAYS CLEARLY STATE THE MODULE CODE in the SUBJECT HEADING of your emails to me). As many of you know who’ve emailed me before, I tend to respond to your queries within a day, even on weekends. If you want to see me in my office, nominate a few timeslots during next week and include your handphone number so that I can reach you either by return email or phonecall. Note that I will tend to respond in English as I am a quicker typist typing in English.

Best wishes for your exams!

Adrian Tien