Learner Engagement in Classical Chinese Adverb Learning and Understanding: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Student Feedback

This study analyzes 614 end-of-semester written feedback texts (705,309 Chinese characters) produced by first-year undergraduates (invited N = 714; response rate = 94.5%; retention rate = 86.0%) in a required Classical Chinese course at a Chinese comprehensive university. The study draws on learner engagement as its analytic framework and applies reflexive qualitative content analysis to three questions: how students retrospectively describe their cognitive, affective, and behavioral engagement with adverb instruction; what instructional conditions they perceive as facilitating or constraining it; and what changes to adverb instruction they themselves call for. Analysis yielded three overarching themes and 8 subthemes, anchored in a codebook of 129 codes (10,334 code applications). Students identified systematic organization of content, procedurally oriented teaching strategies, and patient yet efficient teacher qualities as conditions that made the adverb system feel manageable and supported deeper engagement. Conversely, fragmented presentation, a mismatch between prior grammatical foundations and course difficulty, rapid pacing, and insufficient scaffolding for preparation and review jointly produced a recurring pattern of “cannot keep up, cannot retain, cannot apply.” Student suggestions clustered around three areas: diachronic–synchronic system-building; tiered scaffolding; and context-embedded, contrastive practice tasks. As interpretive implications, the study discusses how grammaticalization and semantic field frameworks may respond to these concerns, and illustrates the potential and limits of large-scale retrospective learner texts for engagement research.