CHIN2600 Essentials of Chinese Language in Social Life
The Complete Study & Assessment Guide · S2 2026CHIN2600 Overview
- 2 units
- The University of Queensland
- Semester 2 2026
- In person, St Lucia
- No exam
Essentials of Chinese Language in Social Life is The University of Queensland's undergraduate course on what Mandarin Chinese is doing in ordinary social life.
- Assessed by Two presentations only: a six minute English talk and a ten minute Chinese video
- Hardest step Turning a language topic into a problem that can end in three suggestions
- How to prepare Collect your Chinese and English data together, by one stated rule
- Watch for The question session covers every reading, not only your own topic
How CHIN2600 is assessed
| Component | Weight | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Project 1: In-Class English Presentation | 60% | Delivered in person in your assigned timeslot between 9 and 25 September 2026, in Weeks 7 to 9. English, no longer than six minutes and no shorter than five minutes forty seconds, with slides uploaded the day before, followed by a three minute question session covering all course readings and lecture material. Identity verified, time limited and a secure assessment. |
| Project 2: Final Chinese Video | 40% | Due 3:00 pm on Monday 9 November 2026, the Monday of examination week one. A video within ten minutes analysing Chinese social interactional data you collected, with English data on a similar phenomenon, at least four illustrative examples (two Chinese and two English), transcripts or text screenshots, at least three suggestions and a reference list. An open assessment. |
What CHIN2600 covers
Twelve frameworks, two projects. Each links to its free chapter guide.
Language Ideology and the Course Frame
Beliefs about language treated as data · the four layers and the evidence each one needs · iconisation, recursivity and erasure · how the modern spoken standard was settled02Identity in Interaction: Five Principles and Names
Emergence, positionality, indexicality, relationality, partialness · the three relational tactic pairs · a set of address forms as the smallest identity data you can collect03Indexicality: How Forms Point to Social Meaning
Icon, index and symbol · shifters and pure nonreferential pointing · the three step route from resource to social meaning · direct against indirect indexing04Unpacking Social Interaction
Stances, acts, register, activities, genres and participation frameworks · paired turns, the three move instructional sequence and format tying · sentence final particles05Transcription: Turning Talk into Data
Broad against narrow · units, transitional continuity, overlap, timed pause · the transcriber's own marks · the four line layout every Chinese extract needs06Stance Taking in Chinese
Affective, epistemic and deontic stance and the forms that carry each · the four modal categories · repair as where modal strength is negotiated07Style, Register and Enregisterment
Repertoire, pragmatic value and social domain · recognition against competence · how a way of speaking becomes a kind of person · two groups, a few features, one semester08Narrative: Telling Lives in Chinese
Tellership, tellability, embeddedness, linearity and moral stance · co-narration and instructional paraphrasing · the grid that shows who a story blames09Emotion, Evaluation and Health Discourse
Classification, assessment and rationale · competing moral grounds in one thread · the five resources responsibility is read off · starting from the headline10Politeness, Face and Compliments in Chinese
Face as claimed and jointly made · emic concepts against emic practices · implicit compliment strategies and the three kinds of reply · the metapragmatic interview11Linguistic Landscape and the Meaning of Place
Interaction order, visual semiotics and place semiotics · a signage policy that changed who a district was for · multisensory fieldwork and what a tight crop destroys12From Class Concept to Your Own Data Project
A problem rather than a topic · the two deliverables side by side · building a matched pair of data sets · what the published grade bands actually rewardIt is designed for students who speak Mandarin as a first language and for advanced users of the language, and it covers language issues of policy, of place, of history, of ideology and of everyday social practice.
The published aim is to help you understand why and how language use is simultaneously a social and an individual choice, and to build the linguistic and intercultural skills that follow from being able to analyse it.
The course has no written examination and no participation mark. Both components are presentations.
Sixty per cent is an in class English presentation of no more than six minutes, delivered in an assigned timeslot between 9 and 25 September 2026, followed by three minutes of questions that may cover any reading or any lecture in the course.
The remaining forty per cent is a final Chinese video of up to ten minutes, due at 3:00 pm on Monday 9 November 2026, which has to analyse Chinese social interactional data you collected yourself, compare it with English data on a similar phenomenon, and end in at least three suggestions.
That structure is why this guide is organised as a bench of analytic frameworks rather than as a revision sequence.
The thirteen tutorial weeks work through identity, interaction, emotion, story, style, act, politeness, multimodality, health and ideology, with transcription, naming practices, geosemiotics and stance taking attached to them.
Underneath all of it runs one procedure, printed at the foot of the slides every week: identify the linguistic and non linguistic resources in front of you, interpret the pragmatic work they are doing, and only then determine the social meaning.
The task sheet states the collection rule that goes with it, which is to begin from a social relationship or an identity and only then go looking for the language features attached to it, rather than beginning from a feature.
There is no set textbook.
Weekly slides, readings and handout materials are provided through the course site, the course is not recorded, and marking criteria and rubrics live in the Assessment folder there. Supplementary assessment is available for this course.
Turning a language topic into a problem the final video can actually solve
- +2Name who is worse off. A topic has no injured party; a problem does. Classroom learners of Mandarin are read as blunt by first language speakers when they disagree. That sentence names a relationship and a cost.
- +2State the phenomenon without naming a language. How a speaker softens a disagreement with someone senior to them. This is the sentence that makes an English comparison possible, because it describes a job rather than a form.
- +2Pick two matched sites. A student group chat where a task is being allocated, in each language. Both are text, both are semi public, both carry an asymmetry the participants recognise.
- +2Write one collection rule that covers both halves. Every disagreeing turn in a fixed window, names removed. A stated rule can be evaluated; representative examples cannot.
- +3Analyse the English half first, and name what does the softening there: hedges, a question form, an apology token, a delay. Doing this first stops you reading the Chinese through a conclusion you have already written.
- +3Climb the three steps on the Chinese half. The form is a particle in final position; the work it does is softening the disagreement, evidenced by where it lands; the social meaning is the gentle, non confrontational position that speakers in this group treat as expected.
- +4Derive the suggestions from the finding, not from common sense. The finding is that the same job is done by different resources, so the suggestions are about teaching the job rather than the form: teach softening as a position to be taken, drill it in disagreement sequences rather than in isolated sentences, and give learners recordings where the same speaker does and does not soften.
Key terms
- Language ideology
- A belief about language that is constructed in the interest of a particular group. It is treated here as data rather than as background noise, because such beliefs are what decide which forms are used and which speakers are taken seriously.
- Indexicality
- The relation by which a linguistic form points at something in its context rather than describing it. An accent points at where a speaker grew up without any part of it meaning that, which is why this relation carries most of the social weight in the course.
- Shifter
- A word whose referent changes with the situation it is said in, such as the words for I, you, here and now. Reported speech is the standard demonstration, because the person word and the place word both move when the utterance is quoted.
- Indirect indexing
- The longer route by which a form reaches a social category only through the pragmatic work it performs. A form softens a disagreement, softening is associated with a gentle position, and that position is associated with a kind of speaker.
- Stance
- The position a speaker takes up toward what is being said, as enacted in the discourse itself. It is displayed in the choice of one form over another, in prosody and in sequence, and it is observable in a way that a feeling is not.
- Deontic stance
- A position about the necessity or possibility of acts by responsible agents, and about the standard of conduct that makes them acceptable or not. In Mandarin it is carried largely by a small set of modal verbs and by the imperative.
- Register
- A set of forms that a community recognises as belonging together and as signalling something about the person using them. It is described along three dimensions: what is in the repertoire, what values attach to it, and who recognises against who can use it.
- Enregisterment
- The historical process by which a way of speaking comes to be recognised as tied to a category of person. Its unity rests on a shared picture of how a certain kind of person is supposed to behave, not on any grammatical property the forms have in common.
- Tellability
- How far the events of a narrative carry the telling on their own. High tellability shows in sensational or unusual content and rhetorically shaped delivery; low tellability shows in a hesitant, awkward launch and threads left dangling.
- Face
- The positive social standing a person lays claim to through the line others take them to have adopted in a given encounter. It is claimed rather than owned, and it is made good between participants rather than held by one of them.
- Geosemiotics
- The study of how a sign means differently according to where it is placed, reading the interaction order, the visual composition and the location together as one aggregate rather than separately.
CHIN2600 FAQ
Is this course assessed by an examination, or only by the two projects?
It is assessed only by the two projects.
The published assessment for Semester 2, 2026 has exactly two components and neither is an examination: an in class English presentation worth 60 per cent, delivered in an assigned timeslot between 9 and 25 September 2026, and a final Chinese video worth 40 per cent, due at 3:00 pm on Monday 9 November 2026. Both are presentations, so preparing for this course means building an analysis of language data you collect yourself rather than revising for a paper.
How long is the in class presentation, and what happens afterwards?
No longer than six minutes, and there is also a floor: a minimum of five minutes forty seconds. It is followed by a three minute question session with the instructor and possibly classmates, and that session is described as covering all course readings and lecture material rather than only your own topic.
Your slides go to the course site the day before your presentation, and your assigned timeslot counts as the due date for the task.
What has to be in the final Chinese video?
Seven things.
An introduction stating a real world, language based problem and why it matters; a theory section saying which frameworks you are using and why they suit this data, drawn from readings covered in class; a data section on how the Chinese and English material was collected and selected; an analysis with at least four illustrative examples, two Chinese and two English; a solution section using an approach taught in class with at least three suggestions grounded in your findings; a conclusion; and a reference list including links to any recordings used as data.
The video runs within ten minutes.
What kind of data am I supposed to collect?
Social interactional data from your own social life: recordings of interactions, online discussion, interviews, text screenshots. The task sheet gives the direction rule, which is to begin from a social relationship or an identity and only then go looking for the language features attached to it, rather than beginning from a feature.
Your analysis has to include transcripts for interactional data or texts for written data, with characters shown for Chinese and words for English.
Is attendance or participation marked?
The two projects are the only components carrying weight in the published assessment table, and the course materials state that attendance is not taken and in class participation is not assessed. The course is also not recorded, and slides are provided through the course site, so missing a class costs you the discussion rather than the material. Check the course profile for anything that has changed.
How are the grades described?
On the University's seven point scale, with published cut offs: 0 to 24, 25 to 44 and 45 to 49 are the three failing bands, 50 to 64 is a pass, 65 to 74 a credit, 75 to 84 a distinction and 85 to 100 a high distinction. The course specific descriptions are unusually concrete.
Analysis that is too descriptive sits at pass level; statements supported by evidence and clear application of class theory sit at credit; going beyond class discussion sits at distinction; and an original contribution sits at the top.
Can I use AI or machine translation?
The published statement for both tasks is that artificial intelligence and machine translation may support you in completing the task and may be used appropriately, but every instance of use must be clearly referenced. Failing to reference such use may constitute student misconduct under the Student Code of Conduct.
Note also that the two tasks differ in security: the presentation is a secure assessment and the video is an open one.
What happens if I submit late or need more time?
The published rules are the same for both tasks: a penalty of ten per cent of the maximum possible mark is deducted per twenty four hours from the time submission is due, for up to seven days, after which the mark is zero. You may be able to apply for an extension, to a maximum of twenty eight days, granted in multiples of twenty four hours. Supplementary assessment is available for this course.
Confirm how any of this applies to you through the course profile and the course site.
How to prepare for the assessments
Treat the first project as the draft of the second, because the course explicitly allows it and the questions you are asked in September are free review of your own argument delivered by the person who will mark the video in November. Choose a problem rather than a topic in Week 3, when the project is introduced, and test it against one question: can you name somebody who would act on your suggestions?
Collect both halves of your data at the same time and by the same rule, since a Chinese data set built in September and an English one scrambled together in November will not be answering the same question. Work the three step route on at least one example until you can say it aloud without notes, because that route is what separates analysis from description in the published grade descriptions.
Finally, rehearse the question session as seriously as the talk: it is attached to the component worth sixty per cent and it is the only place in this course where breadth across every reading is tested.
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