Illustrates reader-response theory by discussing a piece of Chinese art, "A Book from the Sky." Examines the relationship between and among viewer, text or artwork, and artist; and attempts to determine the meanings viewers of different ages, genders, ethnicity, and professions construct in reaction to the work of art and to postmodern…

Reports findings of a case study of three bilingual Chinese-English-speaking children in a mainstream American kindergarten. Focuses on the literacy experiences of the children and cultural beliefs of the teacher. Results suggest several patterns of bilingual children's literacy learning, and demonstrate the connection between the cultural beliefs…

Examines the effects of a time lag before introducing Chinese characters into the elementary Chinese language curriculum. Results found that college students who were provided a three-week time lag were better able to discriminate phonetically and transcribe unfamiliar Mandarin syllables and were more fluent in spoken Mandarin than students who…

Investigation of native Chinese speakers' acquisition of French suprasegmental features found that the subjects not only perceived the different directions of pitch but also placed them in the right categories, in spite of the differences between the use of pitch in tonal and intonational languages. (34 references) (CB)

Comparison of Chinese, Malay, and Tamil primary school students' responses to a test featuring 19 error types related to English verb structure revealed no significant differences between the three groups' selection of developmental errors. The test also showed promise in measuring students' English accuracy as opposed to fluency. (CB)

A validation study of the "semi-direct" Chinese Speaking Test (CST) directly compared college students' performance on the test with their performance on the "live" language proficiency interview. CST provided scoring results largely equivalent to those of the live interview, although examinees perceived CST to be more…

Aims to heighten teacher awareness of the semantic, syntactic, and phoneme-grapheme transfer problems that Chinese students face. Provides teaching suggestions involving phonology, vocabulary, syntax, and morphology. Urges reading teachers to use the visual modality to help make the transfer to the English script system more successful. (RS)

Three experiments used the differential frequency effect as a diagnostic tool to investigate the mental representation of disyllabic compound words in Mandarin Chinese. The results indicated that, when both word frequency and morpheme frequency were held constant, high-frequency first syllables slowed responses to real words. (41 references) (MDM)

Qualitative and quantitative techniques, including a telephone survey of 310 Taiwanese business owners, were used to study the unique features of Taiwanese immigrant businesses in Los Angeles (California). When provided with entrepreneurial capital, Taiwanese enterprises grow rapidly in the context of Los Angeles's economic restructuring. (SLD)

Drawing on the results of sociolinguistic research in three ethnically different communities in Wellington, New Zealand, this paper explores and illustrates the process of language shift and language revival. Members of the Greek, Tongan, and Chinese communities were interviewed; and data were collected on their language proficiency, patterns of…

The function of word order is examined in light of interference in the learning of English discourse by Chinese speakers and vice versa. Emphasis on different devices in coding discourse functions is shown to be reflected in interference between the two languages. (13 references) (LB)

Sociolinguistic patterns, including internal structuring and clinical norms and values, of Chinese communities in Britain are examined. The complexity of the composition of the Chinese population there are reported, and findings from a pilot study of language choice are discussed in the context of wide sociolinguistic issues Chinese people in…

An ethnographic approach was used to examine the learning experience of four Chinese ethnic immigrant students as they made the transition from English as a Second Language to mainstream classrooms in one high school. Fundamental changes are advocated for systematic integration of content and language. (Contains 33 references.) (Author/LB)

Presents a cost-benefit analysis of English language education in China and explores the market value of languages through comparisons of Chinese and Japanese, English and Russian, and Putonghua and Cantonese. It is suggested that the economic strength of a language can be measured by its popularity or its frequency of use among language users.…

An error analysis based on phonetic transcription of French utterances by native speakers of Cantonese yielded a scale of difficulty for word-initial and word-final consonants. The Markedness Differential Hypothesis explained some errors. Evidence also pointed to interaction of language acquisition with markedness reversals. (35 references) (CNP)