The ability of Mandarin learners to express emotion in Mandarin has received little attention. This study examines how English L1 users express emotions in Mandarin and how this expression differs from that of Mandarin L1 users. Scenarios were adopted to elicit joy, anger, sadness, fear, and neutrality. Both groups articulated anger, joy, and fear…

As the Council of Europe is shifting its traditional focus on learning European languages towards emphasizing the importance of speaking other languages of the wider world, an increasing number of schools are offering Mandarin as part of their official curriculum in the United Kingdom. This is being financially supported by…

Asian Americans are often stereotyped as the "model minority." Their sizeable presence at elite universities and high household incomes have helped construct the narrative of Asian American "exceptionalism." While many scholars and activists characterize this as a myth, pundits claim that Asian Americans' educational attainment…

Cultivating positive learning environments for underrepresented groups such as students of Chinese American and Latino backgrounds require careful planning and consideration. As our society strives to embrace individual differences of all cultures, educators must equip themselves with effective tools to adapt to the ever-changing dynamics within…

This paper presents the results of a one-year language curriculum needs analysis project aimed at developing a deeper understanding of the learning needs of first and second year Chinese language students at a university in the United States. The purpose of this project was to provide a foundation for further curriculum development of the…

The current study examined the age of learning effect on second language (L2) acquisition. The research goals of the study were twofold: to test whether there is an independent age effect controlling for other potentially confounding variables, and to clarify the age effect across L2 grammar and speech production domains. The study included 118…

The present study examined book-sharing interactions between mothers and their 4-year-old children from African American (n?=?62), Dominican (n?=?67), Mexican (n?=?59) and Chinese (n?=?82) low-income U.S. families, and children's independent storytelling skills one year later. Mothers' book-sharing style was analysed in terms of…

Foreign language instruction is a complex and challenging task made even more so by situations in which the learner's native language is radically different from the foreign language being mastered. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of native English speakers seeking to learn Mandarin Chinese. The rapid increase in the availability and…

Idiom comprehension and production reflect a child's language competence. Research suggests that there is a positive relationship between children's reading comprehension skills and their idiom understanding. This study examines whether adult verbal scaffolding, in conjunction with the deliberate use of iconic gestures, can facilitate young…

This current study aimed at creating a 3D virtual environment on Second Life particularly for special education students to enhance their first language, Mandarin, learning in vocabulary and sentence structures. Four students aged between 8 and 9 participated in this research. In addition to their inherent disabilities (mild autism spectrum…

This article compares the experiences of Cantonese-speaking students from Hong Kong's Chinese- and English-medium schools when adjusting to the demands of English-medium degree studies. The participants in this mixed-methods study were members of the first cohort to undertake the new four-year undergraduate programme. The findings of a large-scale…

In the first half of the twentieth century, Russian emigrants in China established a network of higher education institutions based on the prerevolutionary Russian educational system. By referring to memoirs and publications in the periodical press, the author traces the history of the most significant educational establishments: Harbin School of…

To investigate the influence of L2 proficiency and syntactic similarity on English passive sentence processing, the present ERP study asked 40 late Chinese-English bilinguals (27 females and 13 males, mean age = 23.88) with high or intermediate L2 proficiency to read the sentences carefully and to indicate for each sentence whether or not it was…

Metalinguistic awareness is the ability to identify, reflect upon, and manipulate linguistic units. It plays a critical role in reading development. The present study investigated Chinese- and English-speaking preschoolers' metalinguistic awareness development and the role of cognitive and linguistic abilities in its development. Forty-two…

Participants were 109 American college students studying Chinese in a study-abroad programme in Beijing. Following Kelley and Meyer, intercultural competence was defined as cross-cultural adaptability involving four dimensions (emotional resilience, flexibility/openness, perceptual acuity and personal autonomy) and was measured with a survey. A…