More than 15 years after the introduction of a standards-based curriculum reform, the mathematics teachers are positive towards the reform message but have not changed their classroom practice accordingly. To improve the impact of future reforms, it is important to learn from this situation and to better understand the role of the national policy…

Chinese characters are used in both Chinese and Japanese writing systems. When literate speakers of either language experience problems in finding or understanding words, they often resort to using Chinese characters or "kanji" (i.e., Chinese characters used in Japanese writing) in their talk, a practice known as "brush talk" ("bitan" in Chinese,…