Many scholars and teachers in EFL education should agree that compared with reading and writing, listening has received much less attention. This brief article discusses important gaps existing in EFL listening and overall proficiency development. It presents the case for a greater focus on sounds and actual listening in the classroom and spoken…

Enhanced Conversational Recast (ECR) is an input-based grammatical intervention approach developed from research on statistical learning. Recent research reported evidence demonstrating the efficacy of ECR on the learning of grammatically obligatory morphemes in English-speaking preschool children with developmental language disorder (DLD). This…

Purpose: We report on a replicated single-case design study that measured the feasibility of an expressive vocabulary intervention for three Cantonese-speaking toddlers with small expressive lexicons relative to their age. The aim was to assess the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic feasibility of an intervention method developed for…

This study is a conceptual replication of Rogers and Cheung's (2018) investigation into distribution of practice effects on the learning of L2 vocabulary in child EFL classrooms in Hong Kong. Following a pretest, treatment, delayed posttest design, 66 primary school students (Cantonese L1) studied 20 vocabulary items over three training episodes…

This innovations in practice article introduces a chatbot that was developed to support and motivate second language learners during the COVID-19 pandemic. The chatbot was designed to facilitate active, out-of-class language learning to supplement in-class input. It can adapt to learners' abilities and pace by chatting with them, thus providing…

While most empirical studies have investigated the improvement of learners' L2 spoken proficiency via speaking-related interventions, the present study examined the same topic through a different modality: listening. Ninety-five first-year tertiary-level students of English as a second language (ESL) in Hong Kong participated in this three-month…

Early trilingual development is an excellent testing ground for input reduction effects on acquisition outcomes. This article reports a study investigating input-outcome relations in a child Leo in Hong Kong, who was addressed to in Mandarin, Cantonese and later also in English by caretakers through 'one caretaker-one language' and 'one day-one…

This study examined the optimal learning schedule for second language vocabulary within an authentic classroom setting in Hong Kong. Following a pretest, treatment, delayed posttest design, fifty-two primary school students (Cantonese first language) studied 20 English adjectives over two learning episodes under spaced-short (1-day interval) or…

Do learners of a second language (L2) need frequent contact with native speakers of that language in order to master its phonology? What if they hear audio recordings of native speakers and receive immediate corrective feedback about their perception? We used a randomized controlled experiment with 135 Chinese speakers (with English as their L2)…

Non-Chinese-speaking (NCS) South Asian students, as ethnic minority group in Hong Kong, are the main disadvantaged social cohort in Chinese language learning. It has been a challenge for L1 Chinese teachers to conduct L2 Chinese teaching to NCS students with diversified native languages and socio-cultural backgrounds. "Reading to Learn,…

Oral input has long been recognised as a key factor influencing second language acquisition in early childhood. Children rely heavily on oral input to learn new words and develop phonological awareness of a language. However, in the context of English teaching in Hong Kong kindergartens -- which feature diversity in language use in the classroom…

This study explored the experiences and language gains of Chinese-background English language learners living in homestays during a short-term study abroad (SA) programme in Australia. Forty-one learners took part in listening dictation pre- and post-tests to assess their acquisition of idiomatic phrasal verbs, and also completed weekly journals…

This study measured naturalistic language stimulation in Hong Kong among eight bilingual (Cantonese, English) infants. Two findings were that (a) infants received more indirect (adult-to-adult) than direct (adult-to-infant) language stimulation and (b) infants received 6.8 [hours] of language stimulation per day with more fillers, vocatives, and…

In diglossic contexts, when speakers typically use two different languages on a regular basis, bilingual speakers display a wide array of attitudes towards each of their languages and associated cultures (Galindo, 1995) and such variability in attitudes can affect their linguistic behaviors (Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner & Fillenbaum, 1960).…

To fully acquire a language, especially its phonology, children need linguistic input from native speakers early on. When interaction with native speakers is not always possible--e.g. for children learning a second language that is not the societal language--audios are commonly used as an affordable substitute. But does such non-interactive input…