Multiple studies conducted over the past decade have suggested the motivational and proficiency-related benefits of commencing language instruction at an early age. Limitations in many of these studies, however, have prevented their results from being applied to the teaching of foreign languages in the United States. In response to calls for…

Social networking sites (SNSs) have become a major form of communication in today's day and age whereby language use has been impacted in various areas especially in that of learning and teaching. Young users use literally half their week engaging in SNSs communication, thereby giving rise to a brand of internet slang which is entirely their own.…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify and evaluate faculty and academic staff perceptions, experiences and expectations with respect to a voluntary, bilingual peer assisted learning (PAL) program, which operates for the benefit of students studying in the Faculty of Business at a regional Australian University.…

Listeners ("N" = 543) in grades 4, 5, and 6 rated their preference for 10 instrumental and vocal selections from various styles, including four popular music selections with versions performed in English, Spanish, or an Asian language. Participants estimated their identification with Spanish/Hispanic/Latino and Asian cultures, the number…

This article explores language ideologies and language uses in a multilingual university in Hong Kong by exploring the voices and experiences of both mainland Chinese and Hong Kong students. Drawing on the notions of language ideologies, separate multilingualism, and translanguaging, the research illustrates how students' linguistic ideologies are…

This study investigates 2-5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's interpretation of the disjunction word "huozhe" ("or") in two positions in "ruguo" ("if")-conditional statements, i.e., in the antecedent clause versus in the consequent clause. The findings from three experiments show that the meanings…

We present an intelligent tutoring system that lets students of Chinese learn words and grammatical constructions. It relies on a Bayesian, linguistically motivated cognitive model that represents the learner's knowledge. This model is dynamically updated given observations about the learner's behaviour in the exercises, and employed at runtime to…

This paper reports our experience in using a parallel corpus to teach Cantonese, a variety of Chinese spoken in Hong Kong, as a second language. The parallel corpus consists of pairs of word-aligned sentences in Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese, drawn from television programs in Hong Kong (Lee, 2011). We evaluated our pedagogical approach with…

This study addresses the importance of helping international students acclimate to their American campus culture in order to meet the aspirations of international education. The study includes a comprehensive overview of international student enrollment in American colleges and universities. It also identifies the many benefits, including…

Public education reform designed for K-12 and higher education exists to transform teaching and learning within the United States in order to graduate today's student. One specific initiative on the federal, state, and local levels is the implementation of Chinese language programs. Some of the Chinese language programs in the K-12 education…

This study focuses on the pedagogical outcomes connected with the use of an e-dictionary by intermediate and advanced learners of Chinese to aid in reading an expository Chinese e-text. Twenty intermediate and advanced participants read an e-text twice aided by an e-dictionary and wrote recalls of the text in English. In addition to low frequency…

Drawing on a corpus of 35 hours of videotaped face-to-face conversations collected in Beijing and Hebei, China, this conversation analytic study examines self-praising behavior of Mandarin speakers in everyday social interaction. Focusing on two reporting practices--reporting another's words and reporting "just the facts"--the…

Eye movements of Chinese readers were monitored as they read sentences containing a critical character that was either a 1-character word or the initial character of a 2-character word. Due to manipulation of the verb prior to the target word, the 1-character target word (or the first character of the 2-character target word) was either plausible…

The present study examined the influence of the features of Chinese characters, such as frequency, regularity and consistency, on the accuracy with which they were read by two groups of adult Chinese learners. Twenty-two English-speakers and 31 Japanese-speakers studying Chinese at a Taiwanese University read 130 Chinese characters that varied…

The authors tested a classic diathesis-stress, stress-enhancement model of perfectionism with subgroups of Chinese (N = 129) and Asian Indian (N = 166) international graduate students attending a major U.S. university. More specifically, the authors tested whether self-critical perfectionism, acculturative stress, and their interaction accounted…