This study examines the interrelated issues of private and public domains of self-esteem, ethnic identity formation, and bilingual confidence among youth of a minority group in a city in western Canada. One hundred, ten Chinese students aged 11-18 from a Chinese-language school were randomly surveyed. Most items of the instrument are derived from…

This article discusses ways in which modern online information technologies may be used to enhance students' understanding of Chinese religions and religious texts. This discussion is predicated upon a model of linguistic communication that places significant weight on the structures and "sedimented presuppositions" of language in determining the…

This study investigated the phonological awareness of 219 first, second, and fourth grade Cantonese-speaking children from the south of China, who received immersion Mandarin instruction beginning in the first grade. Children received onset, rime and tone awareness tasks in Cantonese and Mandarin. Children performed better on the Cantonese onset…

Backpacks are commonplace in American schools. Each day students transport them to and from the classroom as they manage to carve out a little oasis of space to gather their treasures, homework and books. In Fair Lawn's recently launched Chinese classes, backpacks take on new responsibility, becoming culture bearers that connect middle school…

Initial studies on the acquisition of two Spanish copulas, "ser" and "estar", emerged from a research agenda exploring whether second language (L2) development was driven by universal mechanisms manifested in stages rather than an accumulation of entities (Rutherford, 1987). Concerning the Spanish copulas, the stages of acquisition through which…

The authors investigated the Chinese version of the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II-C; Chinese Behavioral Science Corporation, 2000) within the Rasch framework in terms of dimensionality, item difficulty, and category functioning. Two underlying scale dimensions, relatively high item difficulties, and a need for collapsing 2 response…

Since Wang Guowei and Cai Yuanpei introduced the concepts of aesthetics and aesthetic education, respectively, to China in the early twentieth century, there has been a strong tendency in many of the aesthetic discussions to examine ancient texts and materials using modern concepts of aesthetics. In particular, sentences with the character-word…

Since the lifting of martial law in 1987, the rapid liberalization and democratization of Taiwan has led to the transformation of its political structure from a single-party system to a full-fledged two-party system. Along with this political opposition are the two contrastive concepts, the North and the South. Located in this background, this…

This paper seeks to highlight the issue of learner agency in the supervisory relationship. Although this study is confined to the perceptions of a small group of Chinese-speaking international students, this issue is not one peculiar to them. Dealing with status imbalances in this relationship is a challenge that faces all students regardless of…

This paper analyses how an elementary-level future school in Singapore implements and uses various open-source online platforms, which are easily available online and could be implemented with minimal software cost, for the purpose of teaching and learning. Online platforms have the potential to facilitate students' engagement for independent and…

This paper compares the prescribed American and Chinese letter writing formats as outlined in texts and examines actual letters from American and Chinese writers to determine how they compared to these formats and, if they differed, to identify possible reasons for these differences. After teaching students of Mandarin Chinese a basic lesson on…

These instructional materials on Chinese Americans for elementary students were developed through the K.E.Y.S. project (Knowledge of English Yields Success). The contents include a "social introduction," which emphasizes the fact that the Chinese American is not a foreigner; information about immigration; Chinatown; jobs and income;…

Although this booklet is intended for use in the classroom, the author cautions the reader that it is an adventure into Chinese music rather than a teaching or history experience. By learning how to play the music, students "travel" through China, giving them a better understanding of this country. The author describes the invention of…

This study investigates ESL learners' semantic awareness of English words by attempting to estimate a threshold beyond which ESL learners can be said to have reached native-like semantic knowledge. The "Vocabulary Levels Test," originally designed by Nation (1990) and later revised and expanded by Schmitt (2000), was used to operationalise this…

This paper considers the processes of using folk stories for the teaching of community languages in a UK complementary school. We look at the appropriation of folk stories by teachers to teach young people Mandarin while also considering their possibilities as heritage texts. We consider how the teacher and students use the folk story as…