The shift to emergency remote teaching due to COVID-19 brought diverse psychological, emotional, and academic challenges for second language (L2) learners. Overcoming these challenges necessitated the utilization of grit, a personality trait signifying perseverance and passion to sustain academic progress. While grit and emotions have been…

Production of certain English phonemes relies heavily on effort from the abdominal region, and under-utilization of this region by second language English speakers can create difficulties pronouncing these sounds. In particular, production of long vowel/diphthong sounds requires sustained abdominal contraction to maintain the length of these…

Purpose: The present study evaluated the applicability of the sentence-focused framework to Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) by examining the relative contribution of receptive/expressive noun and verb lexicon sizes to later grammatical complexity. Method: Participants were 51 Mandarin-speaking children who received cochlear…

Suprasegmental features (i.e., features realized through pitch, volume, and/or duration changes) are particularly difficult for second language learners. This has led to the creation of many different methods of training, often employing the use of experimenter or instructor-created training materials. However, the use of authentic materials for…

In 2013, Dornyei introduced the Directed Motivational Current (DMC) theory, gaining academic attention for focusing on personal goals and aspirations in second language (L2) education. Most research discusses DMC dimensions and their application to L2 learners, but there is a gap in studies on whether DMC exists among L2 teachers. This study uses…

This paper examines the academic and sociocultural adjustment processes, challenges, and coping strategies of Chinese students who studied at top Western universities prior to relocating to Hong Kong for PhD study. Through purposeful sampling, 30 individuals from one elite university in Hong Kong, the majority of whom won prestigious scholarships,…

The current study examined whether or not lexical access is influenced by detailed phonological features during the silent reading of Chinese sentences. We used two types of two-character target words (Mandarin sandhi-tone and base-tone). The first characters of the words in the sandhi-tone condition had a tonal alternation, but no tonal…

Although second language (L2) learners often have difficulty with learning the L2 pronunciation, the literature has reported a mix of more successful and less successful learners. Many factors could contribute to individual variation in L2 speech sound learning. This dissertation examines a few factors that are hypothesized to influence L2…

The acquisition of Italian stop consonants by Mandarin Chinese-speaking learners has hardly been investigated. This study was designed to fill this gap. To investigate Chinese learners' acquisition patterns of Italian voiced and voiceless stops, a perception experiment and a production experiment were conducted. Twenty Mandarin Chinese-speaking…

Most speakers' first language (L1) in Hong Kong and Guangdong China is Cantonese. Even though the L1 of both Guangdong Cantonese speakers and Hong Kong Cantonese speakers is the same, their second languages (L2) belong to different language families. Previous studies have pointed out that L2 status in third language (L3) acquisition is a salient…

This present study investigated the Chinese vocabulary learning strategies of adolescent learners of Mandarin at two heritage language (HL) schools in Korea. A total of 450 participants from two secondary schools completed the Vocabulary Learning Strategy Inventory (VLSI). The quantitative analysis of the questionnaires was conducted through…

Drawing on ecological perspectives, this study investigates changes in the bilingual education of ethnic Koreans in China in the context of globalization. Focusing on two Chosonjuk (ethnic Korean in China, ?????, ???) schools in Northeast China that experienced challenges due to declining enrollment as a result of the increasing popularity of…

Narrative skills play an important role in children's reading, communication, and critical thinking. Most studies on narrative skills are based on monolingual children from middle- to upper middle-class populations and few have examined bilingual children's narratives outside of the western context. These factors may impose different sociocultural…

The complexity of language contact and intercultural communication has generated various issues in relation to language use and education. As one of the many Chinese dialects ("fangyans"), the Chaoshan dialect ("Teochew") has been affected by the extensive promotion of Putonghua, the key lingua franca across China, and English,…

Counterfactuals are a type of conditional sentences used to convey situations that do not correspond to reality. Tense morphology is a core ingredient to encode counterfactuals in English and most Indo-European languages. Mandarin Chinese (hereafter Chinese) lacks tense morphology and does not require counterfactuals to be formally distinguished…