A grandmother attempts to teach her four-year-old granddaughter the multiplication tables using simple repetition, but they repeatedly start over at 'three fives'; the child keeps coming up with 'thirty-five'. We consider three possible explanations: self-perpetuating frequency of behavior, saliency of memory and Vygotsky's next or proximal zones…

Purpose: There is a lack of standardized Mandarin reading text material that could potentially elicit significant variations in fundamental frequency (F0) and in vocal intensity for clinical voice evaluation. In this study, a phonetically balanced "Three Bears Passage" was developed based on the classical "Goldilocks" story for…

Purpose: This study explored the neural marker indexing deficits in discriminating lexical tone changes in Mandarin-speaking children with developmental language disorders (DLDs) using mismatch negativity, an event-related potential component for auditory change detection. Mandarin has four lexical tones characterized by a high-level tone (T1),…

The present study aimed to examine how visual skills, verbal working memory, visuospatial working memory, and other general cognitive skills (inhibitory control, attention, and decision speed) were simultaneously correlated with the early acquisition of reading among kindergarten children. A total of 99 Chinese children were tested individually on…

This book is cast in a Singaporean context in which Chinese Language is taught as a second language with an emphasis on communicational skills. It showcases ideas on including cultural teaching to enhance second language learning for more effective outcomes. As a collection of chapters relevant to cultural teaching, the book seeks to enthuse…

Informed by sociocultural theories, collaborative writing (CW), a writing activity that involved two or more writers who share and exchange knowledge and negotiate decision-making to complete a single written text (Storch, 2002, 2013), has been found to benefit the second language (L2) students' language learning by a substantial body of empirical…

This study compared individuals from two first language (L1) backgrounds (Italian, Mandarin) to determine how they may differ in their perception of Japanese consonant length (i.e. singleton vs. geminate) according to the phonemic status of length in L1 and experience with Japanese. The participants included two groups of non-native learners of…

The proportion of international students in Chinese higher education is increasing, however, there remains little research that explores their motivations and how their learning of Chinese influences their identities and imagined futures. In this paper, we address the need for research on South-South migration--specifically Sino-African…

Chinese subtitling of English trailers is essential for marketing foreign films in China, and there is a need to focus on audience reception. Ideal subtitles are expected to provide a necessary aid to the audience but to attract as little attention as possible. Paralinguistic factors like punctuation can influence the audience's attention and…

This paper explores the linguistic landscape (LL) of a multi-ethnolinguistic city in China, namely Shangri-La City, where Tibetan, Han (Mandarin Chinese), English and several other minority languages are used. As one of the most well-known Chinese tourist cities by Western travellers, a city with rapid socioeconomic development, and a city that…

Communication in the real world often entails the interpretation, evaluation, and integration of content from different sources. However, it appears that the ability to integrate content into discourse has not been explicitly scored for in existing studies. This study operationalizes content integration in the analytic scoring of a…

The three-dimensional (i.e. affective, behavioural, and cognitive) conceptualisation of student engagement has been the prevalent framework for understanding student engagement, but most existing research has focussed on general, rather than subject-specific, student engagement. The present study tested the psychometric properties of a measure of…

Flipped learning has become a popular approach in various educational fields, including second language teaching. In this approach, the conventional educational process is reversed so that learners do their homework and prepare the material before going to class. Class time is then devoted to practice, discussion, and higher-order thinking tasks…

We examined the developmental trajectories and cognitive predictors of first language Chinese reading, second language English reading, and mathematics skills in Hong Kong children in Grades 1-5. We used longitudinal data of 1,000 children (M[subscript age] = 7.59 years) assessed on phonological awareness, rapid naming, and morphological awareness…

Guided by translanguaging pedagogy, this study examines how monolingual English teachers in a Pre-K school in China navigate between English and Chinese to construct a translanguaging classroom. Findings based on classroom observations and interviews reveal that, despite being constrained by their monolingualism, the English teachers enacted…