This paper explores the possibilities for building research-oriented, school-engaged teacher education through the professional learning of volunteer teacher-researchers. Volunteerism in education covers a broad spectrum of people and activities ranging from working in school canteens to supporting language and literacy programs. This paper…

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between working memory capacity and L2 reading comprehension of both linear texts and hypertexts. Three different instruments were used to measure comprehension (recall, comprehension questions and perception of contradictions) and the Reading Span Test (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980) was…

Integrating both quantitative and qualitative approaches, this study examined the knowledge and application of strategic reading among Taiwanese adolescents learning to read English as a foreign language. A total of 144 Grade 11 students participated in this study. Correlational analysis and t-tests were applied to analyzing quantitative data,…

Mother tongue education in separate schools has been in the norm for several of China's large minorities since 1949. In recent years, however, the shift in minority parental demand, media focus on low educational outcomes of mother tongue education combined with government concerns about separatism have led to the development of mixed schools for…

The present study examines the effects of 3 kinds of glosses--first-language (L1) Chinese glosses plus second-language (L2) English example sentences, L1 in-text glosses, and L1 marginal glosses--in comparison with a no-gloss condition in reading an English passage, to explore whether providing glosses can facilitate reading comprehension and…

This paper investigates the development of referring expressions in the narratives of children learning English as a second language (L2). Spoken narratives in English were elicited from sixty Chinese-speaking participants at four ages--five, eight, ten, and young adults--using the wordless picture book "Frog, where are you?" (Mayer, 1969).…

This qualitative study presents sociolinguistic characteristics of peer-talk of 44 children in a Mandarin-English-speaking preschool in Taiwan where English was taught as a foreign language (EFL). Key findings: teacher-dominated talk influences children's peer-talk; EFL and code-switching emerge in spontaneous peer-talk; children actively engage…

This proceedings is presented in three parts. Part 1 contains summaries of the keynote speech and one paper: "Sa-Jiao: An Important Concept in Understanding Chinese Students' Social Behavior" (Jing-Jyi Wu); and "Our Choices Create Our Future: A Chinese-American Perspective" (Rose Tseng). Part 2 contains summaries of three panel…

Chinese Americans have been called inscrutable--not open to being understood. More casual, spontaneous, and expressive people find it hard to understand the strict discipline of feelings and highly selective and controlled expressions such as the Chinese American may practice. This paper serves as a social introduction to the Chinese American. For…

In spite of long-standing political tensions between Japan and the People's Republic of China, Japanese remains a highly popular language to learn in Hong Kong. This is evidenced by the growth in number of Japanese-related courses and programmes offered at schools and universities in the Special Administrative Region. Although Japan is a dominant…

Lexical tone languages make up the majority of all known languages of the world, but the role of tone in lexical processing remains unclear. In the present study, four form priming experiments examined the role of Mandarin tones in constraining lexical activation and the time course of the activation. When a prime and a target were related…

We investigate a possible universal constraint on spatial meaning. It has been proposed that people attend preferentially to the endpoints of spatial motion events, and that languages may therefore make finer semantic distinctions at event endpoints than at event beginnings. We test this proposal. In Experiment 1, we show that people discriminate…

Purpose: To develop a brief family support function scale for Chinese high school students (FSFS-CHSS). Methods: Standard procedures for scale development (identification of conceptual model, literature review, item selection and modification using consumer and expert panels and item reduction techniques) were used to develop a 17-item scale.…

This study investigated how listener experience (extent of previous exposure to non-native speech) and semantic context (degree and type of semantic information available) influence measures of intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness of non-native (L2) speech. Participants were 24 native English-speaking listeners, half experienced…

After 18 months of research and many practice sessions, Sponge opened in the fall of 2005. This year, Sponge will provide language classes for over 350 children from newborn to seven years in the Seattle area. This language program offers Spanish, Mandarin, French and Japanese--all taught by native speakers. While the staff sets out to create a…