This paper explores the function of bilingual advertising by analyzing a case study of bilingual advertising in the Chinatown of Melbourne, Australia. The use of bilingual advertising in an immigrant setting differentiates itself from those in Asian settings where English is not used by dominant proportion of speakers in the society, and this…

An implicit word learning paradigm was designed to test the hypothesis that children who came to the task of L2 vocabulary acquisition with poorer L1 phonological awareness (PA) are less capable of extracting phonological patterns from L2 and thus have difficulties capitalizing on this knowledge to support L2 vocabulary learning. A group of…

This study investigates the Chinese reading patterns of students with learning disabilities (LD). The performances of students with LD in reading the three categories of Chinese characters were particularly analysed: regular, irregular, and pseudo-characters. Fifty-three students with LD in reading and 44 students without LD of Year 4 were…

By taking Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) as research approach, this study analyzes and discusses two news reports related to the event that a Uyghur man was sentenced to death by the Intermediate People's Court in Xinjiang, a western province of China. Both news reports on that event are taken respectively from two newspapers published in…

This paper constructs a simple two-tier education framework to analyze the effectiveness of multiple language instruction. Suppose that the government attempts to maximize the average post-education productivity. It is shown that the optimal education policy requires different languages of instruction be adopted in the education system. The…

An in-depth exploration of the associations of two aspects of morphological awareness in Chinese--homophone awareness and lexical compounding awareness--to Chinese word reading and vocabulary knowledge was the primary focus of the present study. Among 154 9-year-old Hong Kong Chinese children, both lexical compounding and homophone awareness were…

Based on evidence that listeners may favor certain foreign accents over others (Gass & Varonis, 1984; Major, Fitzmaurice, Bunta, & Balasubramanian, 2002; Tauroza & Luk, 1997) and that language-test raters may better comprehend and/or rate the speech of test takers whose native languages (L1s) are more familiar on some level (Carey,…

This study examined the nature of bilinguals' conceptual representations and the links from these representations to words in L1 and L2. Specifically, we tested an assumption of the Bilingual Dual Coding Theory that conceptual representations include image representations, and that learning two languages in separate contexts can result in…

There have been a number of behavioral and neural studies on the processing of syntactic gender and number agreement information, marked by different morpho-syntactic features during sentence comprehension. By using the event-related potential (ERP) technique, the present study investigated whether the processing of semantic gender information and…

To ratify possibilities for worldly linguistic connectivities and critical theorising there is a need to forgo the exclusionary preoccupation with English and Western critical theories. The debates informing the international circulation of Bourdieu's (1977, 1993, 1999, 2004) ideas provide methodological lessons for moving from critical sociology…

Chinese is not only a tonal but also a visual language represented by tens of thousands of characters which are pictographic in nature. This presents a great challenge to learners whose mother tongue is alphabetical-based such as English. To assist English-speaking background learners to learn Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) well, a good…

Studies using the lexical decision task with English stimuli have demonstrated that homophones are responded to more slowly than nonhomophonic controls. In contrast, several studies using Chinese stimuli have shown that homophones are responded to more rapidly than nonhomophonic controls. In an attempt to better understand the impact of homophony,…

This thesis explores how predictions about upcoming language inputs are computed during real-time language comprehension. Previous research has demonstrated humans' ability to use rich contextual information to compute linguistic prediction during real-time language comprehension, and it has been widely assumed that contextual information can…

This study investigated the cross-cultural validation of the Chinese translation of the Counselor Burnout Inventory (CBI) with a sample of school counselors in Hong Kong. Specifically, this study examined the CBI's factor structure using confirmatory factor analysis and calculated the effect size, to compare burnout scores among the counselors of…

This paper investigates the use of "Facebook" for out-of-class, informal language learning. 190 New Zealand university language students (Chinese, German, French, Japanese and Spanish) completed an anonymous online questionnaire on (1) their perceptions of "Facebook" as a multilingual environment, (2) their online writing…