Contemporary Chinese language pedagogy in the United States started its boom in the late 1990s, with the number of learners steadily increasing at the university level. The number of students learning Chinese in United States institutions of higher education jumped from 5,697 between 1998 and 2002 to 17,429 in 2006 (Furman et al. 2007:3). In 2009, the number reached 60,976 (Furman et al. 2010:3). Over the years, Chinese language pedagogy has absorbed theories from teaching English as a second/foreign language, second language acquisition, and Chinese lingu…