A handful of second/foreign language (L2) studies have examined the effects of practice schedules and reported the advantage of interleaved practice (i.e., practice multiple skills simultaneously) over blocked practice (i.e., practice one skill first and then proceed to the next one). However, no studies in the realm of L2 pragmatics have explored…

Exploring the underinvestigated area of instruction during study abroad, this article offers a quantitative study of linguistic development among second language university learners of Chinese during a semester in China. A comparison is made between learners following task-based language teaching and a comparison group following a traditional…

This study explored the effects of listening-based lexical focus-on-form (lexical FonF) on the acquisition and retention of morphologically complex words. One hundred eighty-two adult English learners with two levels of English proficiency (higher and lower proficiency) from a public university in mainland China were assigned to three different…

The Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK) is a multi-level, multi-purpose Chinese proficiency test developed by the Center for Language Education and Cooperation (previously the Office of Chinese Language Council International and, henceforth, referred to by its colloquial name "Hanban"). It assesses reading, writing, and listening skills of…

Traditional English education in China, with its emphasis on grammatical proficiency and written accuracy, often neglects public speaking, resulting in a notable deficiency in practical language application. This study investigated the potential of project-based learning to address this problem by promoting more interactive, student-centered…

The pervasive use of synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) in second language (L2) learning has generated increasing interest among researchers in integrating SCMC with task-based language teaching (TBLT). This study examined the effects of task complexity on Chinese EFL learners' language production in SCMC modality to develop…

Chinese has a rich and diverse vocabulary of terms, especially verbs, expressing power relationships. This paper selected 25 power relationship terms from the Chinese Proficiency Scale for International Chinese Education, and used a true-false format to test the differences in acquisition between international students from Confucian cultural…

We used the elicited production task to explore the production of short and long passives in 15 Mandarin-speaking preschool children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD; aged 4;2-5;11) in comparison with 15 Typically Developing Aged-matched (TDA) children (aged 4;3-5;8) and 15 Typically Developing Younger (TDY) children (aged 3;2-4;3). This…

When reading Chinese, skilled native readers regularly gain a preview benefit (PB) when the parafoveal word is orthographically or semantically related to the target word. Evidence shows that non-native, beginning Chinese readers can obtain an orthographic PB during Chinese reading, which indicates the parafoveal processing of low-level visual…

Dative alternation between prepositional and double object datives has been a popular topic in second language (L2) acquisition, but only few studies deal with discourse constraints such as the "given-before-new" principle, or given-new (GN) ordering, which describes the tendency to place given information before new information. The…

This article aims to uncover how alignment affects second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition by Chinese-speaking learners of English as they interact with various interaction loads (i.e. input text, peers and video). It also explores how tasks with varying interactional intensity in relation to the interaction loads influence the alignment…

Thinking skills play a critical role in determining language performance. Recent advancement in cognitive diagnostic modelling (CDM) provides a powerful tool for obtaining fine-grained information regarding these thinking skills during reading. Studies are scant, however, exploring the relations between thinking skills and language performance,…

The study examines a corpus of 306 request emails written by 32 English-speaking (ES) teachers and 121 L2 learners from distinctive L1 backgrounds (i.e., Chinese, French, Spanish) and with different levels of L2 proficiency. Pragmatic competence is analyzed through the coding of direct and indirect request strategies used in formal and informal…

Over the past two decades, the Involvement Load Hypothesis (ILH) has become a popular buzzword in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Although applications of the ILH can improve students' learning of productive vocabulary, this effect appears to be transitory. Students' learning of productive vocabulary often fades over time, as shown…

Concept-based language instruction (C-BLI) is a pedagogy guided by sociocultural theory, which has been shown to be effective in facilitating second language learning. Typical activities include materialization by using a schema for a complete orienting basis of an action (SCOBA) and languaging, through which learners' internalization of…