This study reports on findings from two experiments investigating the interpretive patterns of overt pronouns in an embedded subject position with three types of matrix subjects (i.e. a referential NP, a quantified NP, or a "wh"-phrase) in Mandarin, English, and Japanese. According to the Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC), overt pronouns in…

This study investigated whether structural priming, as a reflection of error-driven learning mechanisms, could facilitate second language (L2) learning of the dative alternation in Mandarin. We sought evidence of learning from both priming and acceptability judgment data. Participants were 25 native speakers and 41 classroom learners (CLs). After…

This study explores the effectiveness of online Chinese language courses, focusing on the development of listening comprehension and Mandarin pinyin pronunciation skills among Chinese language students at the Faculty of Education, Uttaradit Rajabhat University. Utilizing a systematic approach, the research employed a pre-test and post-test design…

Rich oral language practices, including the opportunity and ability to participate in cognitively and linguistically challenging extended discourse, are foundational to early literacy development. To meet children's needs in their first exposure to the languages of schooling, educators may engage students in extended discourse multilingually. The…

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…

We examined the naturalistic pronunciation development of two groups of L2 speakers over 10 years. Initially, 50 beginner ESL students participated in production tasks; despite attrition, the tasks were administered eight more times. Here we report listener judgements of accentedness, comprehensibility and fluency for the remaining six Mandarin…

Perception of second language (L2) speakers and their speech is known to be influenced both by phonetic and by sociolinguistic factors. The existing body of scholarly research on L2 speech perception, however, is overwhelmingly focused on Indo-European languages, raising doubts about the generalizability of existing sociolinguistic, phonetic,…

Chinese learners of English often experience difficulty with English tense presumably because their native language is tenseless. We showed that this difficulty relates to their incomplete conceptual representations for tense rather than their poor grammatical rule knowledge. Participants made acceptability judgments on sentences describing…

Rating scales that language testers design should be tailored to the specific test purpose and score use as well as reflect the target construct. Researchers have long argued for the value of data-driven scales for classroom performance assessment, because they are specific to pedagogical tasks and objectives, have rich descriptors to offer useful…

In the past, research on the cognitive neural mechanism of second language (L2) learners' processing time information has focused on Indo-European languages. It has also focused on the temporal category expressed by morphological changes. However, there has been a lack of research on L2 learners' various time coding means, especially for Mandarin,…

The present study continues research that takes non-serious language more seriously (Cekaite and Aronsson 2005) by focusing on a central second language (L2) Metaphoric Competence factor, Metaphor Language Play (MLP). For willing learners, MLP offers a diversity of benefits (Bushnell 2009; Bell 2012a) despite being one of the most challenging…

This article reports on an empirical study of L3 Mandarin, aiming to shed light on transfer effects and their interaction with other factors throughout the L3 acquisition trajectory. A fill-in-the-blank task was employed to examine L2 and L3 acquisition of three types of Mandarin sentence-final particle clusters. Participants in the study were…

Acquisition of the perfective marker "-le" in Mandarin Chinese is a daunting task for second language learners. To date, there has been no consensus on what it is about "-le" that makes it such a challenge to learners. This study investigates the acquisition of "-le" from both a lexical perspective and a discourse…

The purpose of this paper is to describe and reflect on the position of what are called second additional languages in the language teaching landscape of South African schools. This landscape is crowded, with different South African languages vying for attention. Amidst efforts to increase the number of learners who offer an African language as…

This longitudinal study examines the effects of a pre-study abroad (SA) pedagogic intervention and subsequent SA experience on second language (L2) Mandarin fluency. It explores two temporal aspects of oral fluency--planning time and speech rate--along with one performance measure, duration of response. Additionally, L2 contact data were included…