Recent studies in the acquisition of a second language (L2) phonology have revealed that orthography can influence the way in which L2 learners come to establish target-like lexical representations (Escudero et al., 2008, 2014; Escudero and Wanrooij, 2010; Showalter, 2012; Showalter and Hayes-Harb, 2013). Most of these studies, however, involve…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the use of diacritics in the Arabic script of Malay to facilitate Arab postgraduate students of UKM to read the Malay words accurately. It is hypothesised that the Arabic script could facilitate the reading of Malay words among the Arab students because of their earlier exposure to the Arabic script in…

The paper presents preliminary findings of a project which investigated whether learner background, in terms of instruction mode (i.e., school or intensive first-year course at university) and first language (i.e., character based or non-character based), has an impact on the development of writing skills in Japanese as a second language (JSL).…

This article argues that for students of Chinese and Japanese, learning to write Chinese characters ("hanzi/kanji") by hand from memory is an inefficient use of resources. Rather, beginning students should focus on character/word recognition (reading) and electronic writing. Although electronic technologies have diminished the usefulness of…

This paper reports the findings of a psycholinguistic study of the development of phonological awareness (PA) in Chinese children acquiring their first language and learning a foreign language at the same time. The language situation of these children in relation to PA is of particular interest because Chinese and English have not only different…

Chinese characters are used in both Chinese and Japanese writing systems. When literate speakers of either language experience problems in finding or understanding words, they often resort to using Chinese characters or "kanji" (i.e., Chinese characters used in Japanese writing) in their talk, a practice known as "brush talk" ("bitan" in Chinese,…

One of the difficulties secondary non-Chinese-speaking background (NCSB) learners are facing is to remember the characters learned in order to recall them when necessary. The traditional way of teaching secondary NCSB learners to remember Chinese characters is through mere repetition, e.g. writing out each single character by following its stroke…