Despite the recent emphasis on oral English language proficiency in the Iranian education system, the teaching of oral communication remains a challenge for secondary school English language teachers. In this article, we suggest that this, in part, relates to the continued emphasis on literacy practices. The article explores the approach taken by…

In this article, I deal with the transition from traditional "school" forms of instruction to educational processes that are fully mediated by digital technologies. Against the background of the idea the very institution "school" is closely linked to the invention of the alphabetic writing system and to the need of initiating…

This article provides a comparative evaluation of Chinese character reform in the People's Republic of China and Japan, with a particular focus on the latest changes announced in 2009 to the existing script policies in the two countries. The first Chinese script reform took place in 1956 and the first Japanese script reform in 1946, both for the…

The effect of spacing in relation to word segmentation was examined for four groups of non-native Chinese speakers (American, Korean, Japanese, and Thai) who were learning Chinese as second language. Chinese sentences with four types of spacing information were used: unspaced text, word-spaced text, character-spaced text, and nonword-spaced text.…

This monograph discusses South Korea's language situation in a language policy and planning context. This monograph consists of four parts. Part 1 presents a genetic, typological and sociolinguistic description of South Korea's national language, and an overview of minority languages, including English as well as other languages, recently…

This paper describes how Chinese-English bilinguals in Taiwan use their languages in asynchronous computer-mediated communication, specifically, via Bulletin Board System (BBS) and email. The main data includes two types: emails collected from a social network and postings collected from two BBS websites. By examining patterns of language choice…

The influence of different instructional presentations upon meaning and pronunciation acquisition in character learning was examined. High school students learned to identify a series of characters in terms of their associated pinyin and English translation prompts. Acquisition was shown to proceed more rapidly when the Chinese character was…

The complexity of Chinese orthography has hindered the progress of research in Chinese to the same level of sophistication of that in alphabetic languages such as English. Also, there has been no publicly available resource concerning the decomposition of Chinese characters, which is essential in any attempt to model the cognitive processes of…

This study examined word identification skills between two groups of college students with different first language (L1) backgrounds (Chinese and Korean) learning to read English as a second language (ESL). Word identification skills were tested in a naming experiment and an auditory category judgment task. Both groups of ESL learners demonstrated…

Considers whether or not library materials in East Asian languages should be integrated into the general collection. Romanized access through a Latin-script library catalog and nonromanized access through a browsing collection are considered. After exploring the difficulties in romanizing Chinese and Japanese scripts, a separate collection is…

This article analyzes the self-correction of spelling by learners of intermediate Japanese. Participants in this study consisted of 20 students with "kanji" (Chinese characters) background and 43 without. This study investigates (1) types of spelling errors made; (2) the success rate of corrections made when codes for types of errors…