This study explores Tibetan students' L2 and L3 motivational systems and their interactions based on the framework of the L2 Motivational Self-System proposed by Dörnyei. Five hundred fifty-two participants were invited to respond to a questionnaire regarding their Chinese (L2) and English (L3) motivational selves, learning experiences and…

Bilingual education policy in Liangshan, China, has been implemented since the end of the 1970s using two bilingual school models. This study examines how mainstream and bilingual education are correlated with the Yi population's social attachment to the larger social system, and their cultural attachment to ethnocultural maintenance. The…

Language immersion education uses a non-English language for a significant portion of instruction. One goal is to develop bilingual students, which many argue provides cognitive benefits. Using data from school choice lotteries, I estimate the effect of random assignment to a language immersion school on achievement in math and reading. Winning…

Against the background of increasing internationalization, Chinese-foreign cooperative education programs are growing in the Chinese higher education sector. With the international teaching environment combined with the local IC education concept, Chinese-foreign cooperative education programs are potentially the ideal platform for the complete…

Previous studies have shown that young children often fail to comprehend demonstratives correctly when they are uttered by a speaker whose perspective is different from children's own, and instead tend to interpret them with respect to their own perspective (e.g., Webb and Abrahamson in J Child Lang 3(3):349-367, 1976); Clark and Sengul in J Child…

This study investigates the role of proficiency in the acquisition of conventional expressions as a pragmalinguistic resource in second-language (L2) Chinese. One hundred and four undergraduates, including 57 learners of Chinese as a foreign language at 3 levels of university instruction and 47 native speakers completed an aural-oral discourse…

The Revised Preschool Language Assessment (RPLA) is a standardized measure for examining the language status of and determining potential language difficulties among preschoolers between 3 and 6 years old. To facilitate the applicability of the RPLA for use with Mandarin-speaking children, the present study adopted exploratory factor analysis…

This study investigates the influence of causal and concessive relations on discourse coherence in Chinese by means of eye movement and self-paced reading techniques. We use the sentential structure like "NP[subscript HUMAN] moved from place A to place B, {because ([Chinese characters omitted] yinwei) /although ([Chinese characters omitted]…

While research on English-medium instruction (EMI) has proliferated in the past decades, little research has examined how students from a monolingual background actually experience EMI, or the learning processes involved in such experiences. Drawing upon in-depth interviews and student reflection journals, this study examines the experiences of…

International higher education is a major source of revenue in many developed countries. Historically the top destination countries for international students have included USA, UK, France and Australia. The key countries where most international students are recruited from include China, India and other parts of Asia. The extant literature has…

Definite discourse-new bridging reference (e.g., a school … "the teacher"; Clark, 1975) is a complex syntax-pragmatic component of referential movement, one that is subject to relatively opaque form-function contingency compared with forms used for discourse-old reference, and one that is especially prone to crosslinguistic influence.…

In an attempt to promote telecollaborative exchanges in the field of teaching Chinese as a foreign language, this paper conducts a comprehensive review of telecollaborative practice from the past twenty years and focuses on five important themes emerging from the literature on telecollaboration, i.e. models, tasks, challenges, technologies, and…

A number of previous studies on Chinese relative clauses (RC) have reported conflicting results on processing asymmetry. This study aims to revisit the prevalent debate on whether subject-extracted RCs (SRC) or object-extracted RCs (ORC) are easier to process by using the eye-movement technique. In the current study, the data are analyzed in terms…

Purpose The aims of the present study are (a) to quantify the developmental sequence of fricative mastery in Putonghua-speaking children and discuss the observed pattern in relation to existing theoretical positions, and (b) to describe the acquisition of the fine-articulatory/acoustic details of fricatives in the multidimensional acoustic space.…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether a Chinese phonetic script, Zhu-Yin-Fu-Hao (ZYFH), influences low achievers in learning Chinese. In this quasi experimental design, 21 students were assigned to the experimental group, while the other 31 students were distributed to the control group. Two interventions were implemented throughout…