This article explores the acquisition of Japanese vowel and consonant quantity contrasts by Cantonese learners. Our goal is to examine whether transfer from first language (L1) is possible when L1 experience is phonemic but restricted to a small set of sounds (short vs. long vowels) and when the experience is non-phonemic, derived only at morpheme…

Resumptive pronouns are often regarded as a last-resort strategy for rescuing illicit long-distance dependencies. Previous work has demonstrated a facilitative role for resumptive pronouns in production as well as in comprehension, though not a grammatical option in the languages. This study examined whether the same pattern is found in Cantonese,…

Different approaches have been used to teach EFL students summary writing, including a genre-based approach (Chen & Su, 2012), implementing key words and question generation (Chou, 2012), and automatic scaffolding and concept mapping (Yang, 2015). This study aims to explore the effectiveness of another approach--one that might be more…

This article reports an experiment on the implicit learning of second language stress regularities, and presents a methodological innovation on awareness measurement. After practising two-syllable Spanish words, native Cantonese speakers with English as a second language (L2) completed a judgement task. Critical items differed only in placement of…

This project was designed to try to investigate the difficulties EFL learners would have in learning to use hedging as a rhetorical device in academic writing. The participants were 136 native Cantonese-speaking EFL students who enrolled in the one-year course "English for Academic Purposes" offered by a language centre at a university…

This study investigated the effectiveness of a blended learning approach--involving the thesis, analysis, and synthesis key (TASK) procedural strategy; online Edmodo discussions; online message labels; and writing models--on student argumentative writing in a Hong Kong secondary school. It also examined whether the application of digital game…

This study aims to explore the effectiveness of a paradigm to teach native Cantonese-speaking university students the hierarchical structure of expository prose to improve paragraph coherence. Most of the diagnostic argumentative essays the participants in this study wrote in the course were incoherent, failing to meet readers' expectation of…

The "Birmingham Cognitive Screen" (BCoS) is a neuropsychological battery designed to assess impairment to a variety of cognitive domains including language in patients with brain injuries. Twenty-two stroke participants and 16 gender-, age-, and education-matched controls were recruited in Hong Kong. The stroke participants were…

What are the longitudinal cognitive profiles of Hong Kong Chinese children with specific reading difficulties in Chinese only, in English only, or both? A total of 16 poor readers each of Chinese (PC) and English (PE) and 8 poor readers of both orthographies (PB) were compared to a control sample (C) of 16 children; all were drawn from a…

This paper reports the findings of a field experiment that gamified the classroom experience of elementary school ESL students by implementing digital badges-and-points which students could earn by achieving specific behavioral and learning goals. Altogether, 120 children in eight different classes participated in this study. Four of the classes…

Immersion has been an acclaimed approach for second-language acquisition, but is not available to most students. The idea of this study was to create a mobile immersion environment on a smartphone using a mobile instant messenger, WhatsApp™. Forty-five Form-1 (7th grade) students divided into the Mobile Group and Control Group participated in a…

Web 2.0 technologies characterised by user participation and sharing have been used increasingly in academic environments. In such learning environments, it is critical to engage learners as active participants rather than passive consumers of online content. The present study attempts to conceptualise the participation issue central to blogs…

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, employers are seeking "global-ready graduates," that is, individuals with an intercultural mindset, who can interact effectively and appropriately with people from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. In response, tertiary institutions are creating more opportunities for…

This article reports findings from a strategy intervention study involving a treatment class (N=20) and a comparison class (N=20) in an ESL oral setting. Oral communication strategies were taught to the treatment class. A data-collection method comprising stimulated recall interviews that aimed to investigate respectively the learning process…