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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

The field of Linguistics has long been interested in the verb meanings of intransitive verbs and their argument structure, specifically the breakdown of intransitive verbs into unaccusative and unergative verb types. Despite extensive research, a universally applicable explanation for this breakdown remains elusive due in part to the variability…

When teaching Mandarin Chinese classifiers, teachers usually ask students to memorize 'classifier + noun', phrases as collocations. Given that Mandarin Chinese has a vast and complicated system of classifiers, the rote memorization of 'classifier + noun' collocations is challenging and monotonous. Therefore, the present study aims to improve that…

Despite the growth in importance of China, the number of Chinese Studies students in the UK has not increased in the past 25 years and there has been no official review into the state of Chinese Studies in universities since 1999. Based on interviews with over 40 individuals from education, government and business, this report from Michael Natzler…

This article offers a decolonial reading of professional development for English-medium instruction (EMI). The article zooms into the context of Taiwan, where the promotion of EMI has intensified since the 2030 Bilingual Policy was introduced. It is unclear, however, what constitutes EMI professional development, and to what extent the…

Drawing on existing research with a holistic stance toward multimodal meaning-making, this paper takes an analytic approach to integrating eye-tracking data to study the perception and use of multimodality by teachers and learners. To illustrate this approach, we analyse two webconference tutoring sessions from a telecollaborative project…

This study explored Chinese heritage language learners' prior Mandarin experiences and their current Mandarin-learning experiences to reveal factors that influence their motivation and intention to continue or discontinue their Mandarin coursework. Using a Grounded Theory approach, we conducted demographic surveys and semi-structured interviews…

Second language (L2) speakers often experience difficulties in learning words with L2-specific phonemes due to the unfaithful lexical encoding predicted by the fuzzy lexical representations hypothesis. Currently, there is limited understanding of how allophonic variation in the first language (L1) influences L2 phonological and lexical encoding.…

This study examined how Chinese native speakers (NSs) and second language (L2) learners process compound words. The findings showed that they used the hybrid model of coexistence for whole word and morphemes; and were influenced by word frequency, semantic transparency, and word structure. The results revealed that two groups of participants used…