The teaching and learning of Chinese remains a fragile undertaking across all stages of Australian schooling. This paper reports on a practitioner inquiry into pedagogic practices and student engagement with disadvantaged primary school students in a Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) classroom in Sydney, Australia. Drawing upon studies of affect…

This article reviews the current research on stroke order of "hanzi" (as used to write the Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages) in teaching Chinese as a second language (CSL). Based on an extensive review of current research on stroke order, it first discusses the importance and difficulty of stroke order in "hanzi"…

Researcher's observation on his ESL class indicates the main issues concerning the writing skills: learners' low motivation to write, minimum interaction in writing, and poor writing skills. These limitations have led them to be less confidence to write in English. This article discusses how computers can be used for the purpose of increasing…

Nowadays, it is a vigorously-developing project to improve teaching arts in English class. As a result, this article focuses on how to improve English teaching efficiency, how to improve English teaching quality, how to encourage students to participate in studying activities actively as well as how to deal with teaching links at class.

This article argues that for students of Chinese and Japanese, learning to write Chinese characters ("hanzi/kanji") by hand from memory is an inefficient use of resources. Rather, beginning students should focus on character/word recognition (reading) and electronic writing. Although electronic technologies have diminished the usefulness of…

Computers, computer programs, and other novel and vivid technological applications to language learning can unintentionally redirect attentional resources and therefore increase the salience of unplanned as well as targeted features. Incidental activities such as keyboarding (Henry, 1992), manipulation of a mouse (Meunier, 1996), and other…

Petra Rodriguez, a middle-aged Spanish-speaking migrant woman without reading skills, made it clear when interviewed about reading, that she felt it to be the responsibility of literate people to teach illiterate people how to read. The researcher, as part of another project, arranged for tutoring in the woman's home and discovered that the…