This study examines ways in which Chinese immigrant families are involved in their children's mathematics education, particularly focusing on how different types of families utilize different forms of capital to support their children's mathematics education. The theoretical framework defines four types of Chinese immigrant families--working…

This article reports a case study of two Chinese-English bilingual families in Singapore and illustrates the importance of incorporating two hitherto disconnected fields of research--family language policy and family literacy practices--to an understanding of early language and literacy acquisition in the familial milieu. Specifically, this work…

Granted the fact that different cultures have different speaking styles, knowledge of these styles can help people grasp the essence of social cultural knowledge to communicate with others more successfully. In this regard, the present paper aims at comparing the use of speech act of gratitude in Persian and Chinese EFL learners and English native…

Taiwan began its political reform of languages in the 1990s. At this time, "Mandarin Plus" (Official Language Plus) became the core of Taiwanese language policy to deal with the aftermath of forced national linguistic assimilation under Chiang's administration (1945-1988). Mandarin Plus, defined as teaching vernacular languages other…

Humanities includes a diverse range of disciplines in which little literature has explored in any depth the desired learning outcomes. This study was designed to articulate and illustrate learning outcomes in the humanities from students' voices and work. Undergraduate students in their final year, postgraduate students and recent alumni from the…

Three-quarters of Singapore's population consists of ethnic Chinese, and yet, learning Chinese (Mandarin) has been a headache for many Singapore students. Recently, many scholars have argued that the rhetoric of language planning for Mandarin Chinese should be shifted from emphasizing its cultural value to stressing its economic value since…

Many second language acquisition (SLA) studies have traditionally limited their scope of investigation to the description and analysis of errors in L2 learners' use of multiword units. Recently, researchers have begun to approach this topic from a psycholinguistic perspective, examining the processing of multiword units by L2 learners. However,…

This study examines how three age-on-arrival (AOA) groups of Chinese-background ESL students use two types of cohesive devices on a standardized essay exam. A discourse analysis of 90 first-year students' expository writing samples was conducted to ascertain how factors such as first language (L1) and length of residence (LOR) in Canada influence…

This paper investigates the extent to which Chinese students are prepared for academic writing in higher education in the UK, by seeking evidence from a group of 40 Chinese students at a UK university. A mixed-methods approach combining both questionnaires and interviews was adopted to generate data. The main conclusion was that the training that…

A high variability phonetic training technique was employed to train 26 Mandarin speakers to better perceive ten English vowels. In eight short training sessions, learners identified 200 English vowel tokens, produced in a post bilabial stop context by 20 native speakers. Learners' ability to identify English vowels significantly improved in the…

Second Life (SL) has been gaining increased attention in Education since it was launched in 2003. Language educators explored SL mainly as a virtual learning environment where learners can interact with native speakers (e.g., Hislope, 2008; Wang, Song, Xia, & Yan, 2009). Although most studies concluded positively about using SL for language…

A total of 104 six-year-old children belonging to 4 groups (English monolinguals, Chinese-English bilinguals, French-English bilinguals, Spanish-English bilinguals) were compared on 3 verbal tasks and 1 nonverbal executive control task to examine the generality of the bilingual effects on development. Bilingual groups differed in degree of…

One hundred four Hong Kong Chinese fifth graders completed a questionnaire on eight separate motivational subscales related to reading separately for Chinese as a first language (L1) and English as a foreign language (EFL) in addition to measures of both Chinese and English reading comprehension. Motivations related to self-efficacy, curiosity,…

Parent training (PT) is well established for reducing child externalizing problems; however, lower rates of engagement in PT among ethnic minority/immigrant families have been found. We assessed PT acceptability among Chinese immigrant parents and explored clinical and cultural factors that may be associated with acceptability. Participants were a…

This study investigates the relationship between English listening comprehension and English and Chinese phonological awareness (PA), and the cross-linguistic transfer of PA in 48 Grade 2 and 47 Grade 4 Chinese English-immersion students. The results of the study indicate a correlation between English PA and English listening comprehension.…