As China is increasingly occupying the world's attention, its explosively expanding economical and political clout has also been felt in the applied linguistics domain, with the discussion on China's/Chinese language issues growing by leaps and bounds (e.g. China's English education policies, Chinese language classes in the West). Amid the world's…

The present study examined the equivalency of conventional and web-based tests in reading Chinese. Phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), reading accuracy, and reading fluency tests were administered to 93 grade 6 children in Taiwan with both test versions (paper-pencil and web-based). The results suggest that conventional and…

The present study compares the discourse organization in compositions by senior high school students in Taiwan in their Chinese and English classes and explores the influence of their teachers' writing instruction in order to extend the current understanding of students' discourse organization in the school context. The researcher collected data…

This study examines incongruent languages ideologies as they exist among parents, grandparents and community members of Taiwan's aboriginal Pangcah people. The language ideologies of the villagers function as language policy that informs their decisions in favor of transmitting or abandoning their linguistic heritage. Taking a critical perspective…

Two groups of Mandarin-English bilingual children (3-5-year-olds, 6-8-year-olds) participated in a picture identification task and a picture naming task in both languages. Results revealed age-related growth in English, but not Mandarin vocabulary. Composite vocabulary was larger than either single-language vocabulary in the younger children but…

This study investigated second language (L2) learners' acquisition of English /t, d/ deletion patterns in word-final consonant clusters, (a) focusing on how constraints such as grammatical conditioning and phonological environment affect deletion of /t, d/ in L2 acquisition and (b) determining the extent to which these L2 learners had acquired…

This article reports the results of an experiment designed to investigate the effectiveness of pinyin (a phonic transcription system) in learning vocabulary of Chinese as a second language from the perspective of cognitive load theory. In the reported experiment, the learning effects of the vertical and horizontal layouts of characters, pinyin,…

This study explores Chinese learners' metacognition in EFL pronunciation learning as well as the effectiveness of helping the learners to improve their English pronunciation by metacognitive instructions. By means of preliminary interviews and a questionnaire survey carried out in seven universities across mainland China, six factors of…

Among 262 Chinese children, syllable awareness and rapid automatized naming (RAN) at age 5 years and invented spelling of Pinyin at age 6 years independently predicted subsequent Chinese character recognition and English word reading at ages 8 years and 10 years, even with initial Chinese character reading ability statistically controlled. In…

The present study had two aims: First, to investigate the joint and specific roles of working memory (WM) and intelligence as predictors of school achievement. And second, to replicate and extend earlier findings (Spinath, Spinath, Harlaar, & Plomin, 2006) on the incremental validity of non-cognitive over cognitive abilities in the prediction…

This paper reports on a study designed to investigate the acquisition of metalinguistic knowledge by L2 learners exposed to large doses of explicit grammar instruction, their facility with metalanguage, and the relationship between metalinguistic and metalingual knowledge. Seventy-six young adult Chinese learners of English as a foreign language…

Schools are often encouraged to facilitate extra-curricular learning within their own premises. This study addresses the potential of social networking sites (SNS) for supporting such out-of-class study. Given concerns that learning on these sites may happen at a surface level, we adopted self-determination theory for designing a social networking…

Global migration has had significant impact on the traditional configuration of the classroom role set. The language teacher may be teaching a group of learners with highly mixed interests, abilities, learning histories and exposures to the target language, while the language learner may be confronted with so many different models of the target…

This study evaluated the impact of two metalinguistic factors, English derivational awareness and English-Spanish cognate awareness, and the impact of two sociocultural factors, maternal education and children's length of residence in Canada, on English Language Learners (ELLs)' vocabulary knowledge. The participants of the study were 89…

After China resumed the sovereignty of Hong Kong, the Curriculum Development Council encouraged schools to experiment with Putonghua as a medium of instruction (PMI) to teach the Chinese language. A review of the literature indicates that there have been problems in implementing the switch to the new medium of instruction (MOI). The aim of this…