The Instruction and Acquisition of the BA Construction by Students of Chinese as a Foreign Language tackles the linguistically unique and notoriously difficult BA construction in Chinese, covering its linguistic properties and acquisition by learners of Chinese as a foreign language, alongside teaching recommendations. Adopting the Interface Hypothesis and the Processing Instruction approach, Hongying Xu argues that not all linguistic properties of the BA construction are equally difficult to acquire and that properties that call for knowledge from interfaces-including semantics, pragmatics, and syntax-are more difficult to master than those that involve pure syntactic knowledge. Xu argues that instructors should provide manipulated input to help learners notice and process these properties before they are required to produce any grammatical and appropriate sentences using the ba construction.

Hongying Xu is associate professor in the Department of Global Cultures and Languages at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.