Affordance refers to the opportunity available to a learning activity. Taking affordance as a theoretical and analytical construct, this exploratory study investigates learners' attitudes and the opportunities WeChat may provide for Chinese cultural knowledge (CCK) learning. The aim is to find out the potential new affordances and compare learners…

This research analyzes the acoustic characteristics and conducts a perception test of Thai tones produced by Chinese learners learning Thai through the "Thai Tone Application". A comparison of Thai tones pronounced by 40 Chinese learners learning Thai at Nakhon Ratchasima Rajabhat University with 40 Thai native speakers was also…

Under the task-based language teaching (TBLT) framework, this study investigated learners' perceptions of a WeChat task being integrated into a Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) curriculum. The WeChat task linked up learners of Chinese from an Australian university with native speakers of Chinese as international students on the same campus. The…

This article discusses principles involved in developing course materials for technology-mediated Chinese language learning, with examples from a new course designed to take into account the needs of distance and independent learners. Which learning environment is most efficient for a given learning activity needs to be carefully considered. It…

In English, positions of lexical stress in disyllabic words are associated with word categories; that is, nouns tend to be stressed more often on the first syllable, whereas verbs are more likely to be stressed on the second syllable (i.e. "sub"ject (noun) vs. sub"ject" (verb)). This phenomenon, which is called the stress…

Reporting on a descriptive study on the first semester Chinese language learners' openings and closings in online chats with age-peer native speakers of Chinese, this paper demonstrates the great promise that telecollaboration holds for foreign language education, and argues for an increasing role of pragmatics in Chinese language instruction, and…

In the context of a project developing software for pronunciation practice and feedback for Mandarin-speaking learners of English, a key issue is how to decide which features of pronunciation to focus on in giving feedback. We used naive and experienced native speaker ratings of comprehensibility and nativeness to establish the key features…

In this paper we present a system for automatic correction of errors made by learners of English. The system has two novel aspects. First, machine-learned classifiers trained on large amounts of native data and a very large language model are combined to optimize the precision of suggested corrections. Second, the user can access real-life web…

In a contrastive rhetoric study of nonnative English speakers, 768 essays written in English by native speakers of Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, and English were examined using the Writer's Workbench program to determine whether distinctive, quantifiable differences in the use of 4 cohesion devices existed among the 4 language backgrounds. (Author/LB)

Four writing samples were obtained from 638 foreign college applicants who represented three major foreign language groups (Arabic, Chinese, and Spanish), and from 60 native English speakers. All four were scored holistically, two were also scored for sentence-level and discourse-level skills, and some were scored by the Writer's Workbench…