In this paper, we present a research approach that makes visible how young children in Chinese immigrant families muster their multilingual, multimodal and multisemiotic repertoires as they interact with distant family and friends on social media. The approach brings multimodal social semiotics into conversation with translanguaging to…

As an essential mode of communication, oral presentation plays an important role in the development of second language (L2) automaticity. However, unless best practices are carried out--massive meaningful practice, when presenting seldom relying on the script, in conversational style, and keeping meaningful eye contact with the audience--oral…

The present study investigated the executive functioning of working memory, inhibition, shifting, and planning in Chinese adolescent readers with dyslexia and how they related to Chinese (L1) and English (L2) reading comprehension. Fifty-seven Hong Kong Chinese students at Grade 7 were compared with 57 typically developing readers of…

Learning to mark for tense in a second language is notoriously difficult for speakers of a tenseless language like Chinese. In this study we test two reasons for these difficulties in Chinese-English sequential bilingual children: (1) morphophonological transfer (i.e., avoidance of complex codas), and (2) interpretation of -"ed" as an…

The present study investigated whether Mandarin-speaking preschool children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) were able to use prosodic cues to understand others' communicative intentions. Using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, the study found that unlike typically developing (TD) 4-year-olds, both 4-year-olds with ASD and 5-year-olds…

Many studies investigated metaphors in news; however, few of them focused specifically on headlines. By investigating metaphors in 133 collected NBA news headlines written in Chinese, this paper analyzes the creativity in them. Conceptual Metaphor Theory, including conceptual metonymy, is adopted to discuss creative linguistic metaphors and their…

This review, which can be seen as a scoping review, highlights 92 empirical studies about the learning and instruction of reading Chinese as an additional language (CAL) published in English between 1976 and 2018. It first identifies and evaluates the trends of CAL reading research over the past four decades, including the developmental trajectory…

Academic achievement is one of the most important indicators for assessing students' performance and educational attainment. Family socioeconomic status (SES) is the main factor influencing academic achievement, but the relation between SES and academic achievement may vary across different sociocultural contexts. China is the most populous…

Purpose: We compared the narrative production in Mandarin-speaking children at risk (AR) for developmental language disorder (DLD) and typically developing (TD) controls to address two goals: (a) further our understanding of the Mandarin DLD phenotype and (b) examine the role of elicitation method in differentiating AR from TD. Method: Twenty-one…

The theory underlying L2 oral fluency has focused on cognitive processes, particularly proceduralization (Anderson, 1983; Levelt, 1989, 1999) and linguistic constructs, especially vocabulary and grammar (Segalowitz, 2010). Towell, Hawkins, and Bazergui (1996) argued that development of formulaic language enables automatic speech production.…

This study employed speech-enabled language translation (SELT) technology in lectures presented in English as a medium of instruction (EMI). Previous research had students viewing pre-recorded lectures with incorporated content translations in controlled laboratory settings. In contrast, students in the present study experienced live lectures in…

There has been much debate in assessment research about the inclusion of Global English accents in high-stakes listening tests. This study explored test-takers' attitudes toward the inclusion of different English accents in the Duolingo English Test (DET) 2021 test version and their associations with listening test scores. One hundred sixty…

Research has established the link between socioeconomic status (SES) and children's reading development. However, the theoretical mechanisms underlying the association between them have yet to be fully understood. Moreover, few previous studies exploring the mechanisms tapped both first language (L1) and second language (L2) at the same time. In…

Purpose: Although acquisition of Chinese lexical tones by second language (L2) learners has been intensively investigated, very few studies focused on categorical perception (CP) of lexical tones by highly proficient L2 learners. This study was designed to address this issue with behavioral and electrophysiological measures. Method: Behavioral…

This study explores international Chinese as a foreign language students' use of embedded scaffolding materials to facilitate their learning in an autonomous online context during the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 60 international students enrolled in a Chinese university participated in the study. Data were collected via participants' reflective…