This study investigated motivation in the context of L2 Chinese in the USA. A total of 120 college students took the survey and 27 of them participated in post-survey interviews. Through a mixed-methods design, the study captured interactions between motivation and the learning environment in the learning process. The results revealed six…

Quantitative research on the linguistic acculturation of sojourners in non-Western and multilingual social contexts remains scarce. Revising the Framework of Acculturation Variables (FAV), we propose a parsimonious model exploring the effect of acculturation conditions (trilingual language usage and perceived discrimination), orientations (social…

Trilingualism is a powerful fact of life in many parts of the world, including most autonomous regions inhabited by minority ethnic groups in China. Although much research has been conducted on the language attitudes of stakeholders from minority ethnic groups, the attitudinal object is usually an individual language (e.g. the ethnic language, the…

This study examines perceptions of language threat in Hong Kong against a background of increasing political tensions between Hong Kong and the People's Republic of China (PRC). These tensions gained international attention in 2014 during the 79-day protests known as the Umbrella Movement and more recently in 2019 due to the proposed introduction…

This paper examined language anxiety (LA) in Chinese dialects and Putonghua among college students in mainland China and explored the links between their LA in the first language and a range of sociobiographical variables (i.e. gender and geographical background) as well as linguistic variables (i.e. mother tongue, age of onset of acquisition,…

Not only does Singapore have a unique ethnic and multilingual makeup, it also boasts unique language policies, especially with regard to the learning of the official languages. Previous studies of Singaporean youths have largely focused on the differences in attitudes and code-switching between linguistic varieties (e.g. Colloquial Singapore…

The People's Republic of China (PRC) has often been considered a monolithic, monolingual state but, in fact, it is linguistically and culturally diverse. Despite the size, there is still a lack of sociolinguistic studies on the Han Chinese in the PRC. Therefore, this study focuses on the language attitudes of Cantonese-speaking students in…

This quantitative study investigated the extent and contexts of target language (TL) use in English language classrooms. Participants were 2,906 students from seven secondary schools and four universities in the more developed cities in southern China. They were put into five groups according to their educational stage and whether their content…

Informed by linguistic ecological theory and the notion of identity, this study investigates language uses and identity construction in interactions among students with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds in a multilingual university. Individual and focus-group interviews were conducted with two groups of students: Hong Kong (HK) and…

In spite of long-standing political tensions between Japan and the People's Republic of China, Japanese remains a highly popular language to learn in Hong Kong. This is evidenced by the growth in number of Japanese-related courses and programmes offered at schools and universities in the Special Administrative Region. Although Japan is a dominant…

Describes findings based on a self-rating scale by 38 teaching English as a second language (TESL) student teachers at a Malaysian university, responses to a self-rating scale by 20 TESL teachers, and case studies of 20 bilingual student teachers. Penaflorida's response focuses on strategies for dealing with learners with limited linguistic and…