This study aimed to examine the acquisition of Roman alphabetic script among young children within a bilingual (Arabic and English) educational environment employing a language separation pedagogical approach in Muscat, Oman. Data were collected utilizing participant observations, video recordings to capture the interactions of three children and…

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…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the use of diacritics in the Arabic script of Malay to facilitate Arab postgraduate students of UKM to read the Malay words accurately. It is hypothesised that the Arabic script could facilitate the reading of Malay words among the Arab students because of their earlier exposure to the Arabic script in…

Heritage language speakers struggle in European classrooms with insufficient material provided for second language (SL) learning and assessment. Considering the amount of instruments and pertinent studies in English SL, immigrant students are better prepared than their peers in Romance language settings. This study investigates how factors such as…

Teaching Chinese as a foreign language (TCFL) is increasingly becoming a mainstream profession and an independent academic discipline. However, there is little research in CALL targeting the Chinese language to date. This research attempts to show how a CALL system can be constructed following the unique properties of the Chinese language so it…

This study investigated the effectiveness of the integrative perceptual approach (IPA) to enhancing Hong Kong kindergarten children's Chinese character learning. The study applied the IPA to an experimental group of 29 lower form (K2) children. A group of 30 upper form children taught via traditional methods the year before, served as the control…

This paper examines how transliteration can be used as a bridge to learning for children who are studying more than one script. The focus is on second and third generation British Bangladeshi children aged 7-11, attending London primary schools and learning to write in Bengali at community-run after-school classes. An action research project…

The paper presents preliminary findings of a project which investigated whether learner background, in terms of instruction mode (i.e., school or intensive first-year course at university) and first language (i.e., character based or non-character based), has an impact on the development of writing skills in Japanese as a second language (JSL).…

One of the difficulties secondary non-Chinese-speaking background (NCSB) learners are facing is to remember the characters learned in order to recall them when necessary. The traditional way of teaching secondary NCSB learners to remember Chinese characters is through mere repetition, e.g. writing out each single character by following its stroke…

American students are exposed to many different romanization systems when learning Chinese. The most important systems include Pinyin, Zhuyin fuhao, Wade-Giles, Gwoyeu Romatzhy, and the Yale system, to name just a few. The Pinyin system, which is built on the English alphabet, is the official transliteration system of mainland China. The Zhuyin…

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…

In the communicative approach, English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners use scripted and unscripted language. In practice, scripted language is typically over-utilized at the expense of unscripted language. This study explores the characteristics of scripted and unscripted language in 11 beginner-level EFL students in a Japanese junior high…