This article focuses on the role of language ideology in four students' ethnic identity during one stage. I employ Bakhtin's concepts of ideological becoming, and of authoritative and internally persuasive discourse to explore how the student participants are conscious of language and social worlds, including their heritage language and ethnic…

Mastering the visually complex characters of the Chinese language poses significant challenges for students. The situation is even worse in Hong Kong, where students with different backgrounds, including students with/without dyslexia and non-Chinese speaking (NCS) students, are placed in the same class. Interactive design has been proven…

This study examined whether one Taiwan's heritage language immersion influences children's preference for the heritage language or cross-language. The research questions are: (1) What are children's attitudes toward the Hakka language (HL)? Does a significant difference exist in children's attitudes between those in the Hakka Language Immersion…

Both language input and output are important to child language learners' heritage language development. Nevertheless, existing studies mainly focus on language input, leaving the significance of language output underexplored. The current study assessed 201 kindergarteners' Mandarin skills (i.e., receptive vocabulary, receptive grammar, and verbal…

In order to distinguish between language-related ideologies, Ruiz (1984) proposed three language orientations, namely 'language-as-problem', 'language-as-right' and 'language-as-resource'. Although this typology has been applied to various countries and regions around the globe, relevant research in China, a multi-ethnolinguistic country, remains…

The interrogative sentence expression of 22 children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (HFA) was tested using an induced experimental paradigm and compared with two groups of typical developing children matched by chronological age and language age. Results from the present study demonstrated that the interrogative sentence expression…

When teaching Mandarin Chinese classifiers, teachers usually ask students to memorize 'classifier + noun', phrases as collocations. Given that Mandarin Chinese has a vast and complicated system of classifiers, the rote memorization of 'classifier + noun' collocations is challenging and monotonous. Therefore, the present study aims to improve that…

Mainland Chinese students' (MCSs') cross-cultural adaptation experiences in Hong Kong have remained under-researched. Our study investigates this phenomenon with a language and social psychology approach and explores the role of Cantonese ability and communication with locals. We invoked Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) to investigate the…

Little is known about the impact of teachers' questions on child bilingual's heritage language reading process and outcomes. This study examined the role of adults' questions in English-Mandarin bilingual preschoolers' Mandarin word learning, story comprehension, and reading engagement. Ninety-nine 4- to 5-year-old preschoolers in Singapore were…

Adult second language learners often show considerable individual variability in the ease with which lexical tones are learned. It is known that factors pertaining to a learner's first language (L1; such as L1 tonal status or L1 tone type) as well as extralinguistic factors (such as musical experience and working memory) modulate tone learning…

In the field of educational sociolinguistics there is a body of literature with a focus on children in complementary schooling. While timely, such work often does not often pay much attention to the parents who frequent the school setting, preferring to focus on the interactions between children. This paper addresses this absence by reporting on a…

The field of language policy and planning has seen increasing scholarly attention that explores social actors' micro language planning towards a given language policy situation at the grassroots level. In educational contexts, teachers and educators are often considered pivotal locals whose agency, when enacted in micro language planning, can…

Singapore is a multiracial nation with a majority ethnic Chinese population. Since its independence in 1965, it has adopted an 'English-knowing' bilingual policy to achieve economic, social, and political objectives. For the past two decades, there has been a rapid increase in the percentage of ethnic Chinese Primary One students coming from…

Purpose: Previous studies have demonstrated that tone identification can be facilitated when auditory tones are integrated with visual information that depicts the pitch contours of the auditory tones (hereafter, visual effect). This study investigates this visual effect in combined visual-auditory integration with high- and low-variability speech…

Purpose: This study investigates how Mandarin-English bilingual students in Canada produce Mandarin tones and how this is influenced by factors such as tone complexity, cross-linguistic influences, and speech input. Method: Participants were 82 students enrolled in a Chinese bilingual program in Western Canada. Students were recruited from Grades…