Children learning Chinese must cope with an opaque orthography lacking transparent relations between oral pronunciations and written characters: a challenge heightened for L2 learners. Use of digital Pinyin input may facilitate connections between oral and written language by allowing learners to access vocabulary they cannot yet write. We…

Lexical competence is considered as an important indicator of language proficiency. While learning vocabulary, learners need to remember various aspects of knowledge about the word (e.g., meaning, form and use). Many vocabulary learning strategies have been proposed to help learners consolidate vocabulary knowledge. Among them, grouping words…

This study investigated how the integration of a game-based learning strategy and a tangible user interface (TUI) device improves the learning achievement of fifth-grade students in studying Chinese idioms. By using the sifting, and sorting, features of Sifteo Cubes, learners, via a gaming situation, manually composed the cubes to the correct…

Background: This study examined the use of student-teacher interactions through dynamic assessment (DA) to diagnose and promote the learner's comprehension on Chinese writing patterns. Debates over the uses of standardized tests to assess language learners' performance have been ongoing in the field of second language acquisition for many years.…

This paper reports on an action research study using iPads during the teaching of Chinese idioms to heritage learners. A class of 12 second-year Chinese learners were engaged in a self-generated learning process focused on learning abstract and concrete idioms using iPads. Students' short-term and long-term learning was measured; feedback from a…

As part of a learner's learning ecology, the informal, out-of-school settings offer virtually boundless opportunities to advance one's learning. This paper reports on "Move, Idioms!", a design for Mobile-Assisted Language Learning experience that accentuates learners' habit of mind and skills in making meaning with their daily…

This paper examines whether and to what extent data-driven learning (DDL) activities can improve the lexico-grammatical use of abstract nouns in L2 writing. A topic-based corpus was compiled to develop concordance learning activities, and 40 Chinese students majoring in English were randomly assigned to a control group or an experimental group. At…

Formulaic language is important to language acquisition; however, English language learners are often reported to have problems with formulaic expressions. Several lists of formulaic sequences have been proposed, mainly for developing teaching and testing materials. However, their limited numbers and insufficient usage information seem unable to…

This paper proposes the identification and use of principle-based pedagogical patterns to help teachers to translate design principles into actionable teaching activities, and to scaffold student learning with sufficient flexibility and creativity. A set of pedagogical patterns for networked Second language (L2) learning, categorized and…

This paper reports an intervention study on Singapore primary five (fifth Grade) students' ICT (information and communication technology)-mediated Chinese idiom learning. We introduced "seamless learning" to the learning design, that is, the bridging of formal and informal learning, and individual and social learning, conforming to the…

For various reasons, second language learners modify their speech by means of self-repair. This study, based on a small-scale corpus, shows the patterns and features of self-repairs by intermediate Chinese learners of English. The results suggest that intermediate Chinese learners of English more frequently make repairs than advanced Chinese…

One of the main objectives of the Chinese Bilingual Pilot Program in San Francisco is to teach Cantonese to non-Chinese speaking children. This teacher's manual is designed to be used at the second level of instruction in Chinese as a second language. For each of the thirty-five lessons, the materials needed are indicated. The basic grammar…

This paper explores the features of rhythm that make English difficult for speakers of Chinese and suggests some techniques for helping students speak English with an English rhythm. The focus is on information obtained during a workshop: the rhythmic differences between Chinese and English, word rhythm in English, and sentence rhythm in English.…

The approaches used for reading instruction in the United States and in the People's Republic of China are different and incompatible. In China, English reading is taught intensively, through close-reading or detailed oral analysis of brief texts and with great attention to individual words and phrases. This "bottom-up" processing style,…