The seemingly optional use in discourse and rich discourse-pragmatic functions make the Mandarin topic-comment construction a challenging structure for L2 learners of Chinese. Beginning and intermediate level learners tend to display a lack of use of it (Jin 1994; Cao et al. 2006). Drawing upon linguistic and applied linguistic findings, this study discusses five discourse-pragmatic functions of the double-nominative topic-comment construction and introduces a pedagogical design using authentic media materials like film clips and TV shows to teach elementary and intermediate level learners when and how to choose this topic-comment construction in specific contexts. The study aims to explore some possibilities and methodologies of providing lower-level L2 learners an opportunity to know how a certain language structure is used in specific contexts in L1 discourse, and in so doing, teach learners how to make informed linguistic choices right from the beginning level. (All relevant video clips used in this article can be found at this website:
https://www.danjiesu.com/research/)
(本文於2020.03重新修訂)