This study examines strategies (inferencing and ignoring) and knowledge sources (semantics, morphology, paralinguistics, etc.) that second language learners of English use to process unfamiliar words in listening comprehension and whether the use of strategies or knowledge sources relates to successful text comprehension or word comprehension.…

Drawing on research on complementary schools in the United Kingdom, this presentation considers some of the issues in the research method used in studying this after-school community site. Processes of analysis employed by the ethnography team are disclosed so as to illuminate the dynamics of theory building in a large research team. (Contains 2…

This article offers an overview of how the Language Flagship Program integrates languages for specific purposes (LSP) components into its broader mission of having students graduate with Superior Level linguistic proficiency and cultural competence, thus being well equipped to function as global professionals in the major of their choice. Turning…

Based on the theory of linguistic universal and Second Language Acquisition (SLA), the paper discusses the acquisition of syntactic positions of adverbs in English. According to the data collected, the paper concludes that what adult learners acquire about adverbs is the distinction of different adverbs and the different scopes they take.…

The process of reading aloud bare nouns in alphabetic languages is immune to semantic context effects from pictures. This is accounted for by assuming that words in alphabetic languages can be read aloud relatively fast through a sub-lexical grapheme-phoneme conversion (GPC) route or by a direct route from orthography to word form. We examined…

The aim of this study was to adapt and evaluate the Developmental Coordination Disorder Questionnaire (DCDQ) for use in Chinese-speaking countries. A total of 1082 parents completed the DCDQ and 35 parents repeated it after 2 weeks for test-retest reliability. Two items were deleted after examination of test consistency. Cronbach's [alpha] for the…

An event-related potential (ERP) study was conducted to investigate the temporal neural dynamics of semantic integration processes at different levels of syntactic hierarchy during Chinese sentence reading. In a hierarchical structure, "subject noun" + "verb" + "numeral" + "classifier" + "object noun," the object noun is constrained by selectional…

This article discusses the learning process undertaken by language teachers in a cyber face-to-face teacher training program. Eight tertiary Chinese language teachers attended a 12-week training program conducted in an online synchronous learning environment characterized by multimedia-based, oral and visual interaction. The term "cyber…

This study involves a large-scale investigation of willingness to communicate (WTC) in Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classrooms. A hypothesized model integrating WTC in English, communication confidence, motivation, learner beliefs, and classroom environment was tested using structural equation modeling. Validation of the…

Previous research into the cognitive processes involved in reading Chinese and developmental dyslexia in Chinese, revealed that the single most important factor appears to be orthographic processing skills rather than phonological skills. Also some studies have indicated that even in alphabetic languages some dyslexic individuals reveal deficits…

Dyslexia appears to be the most prevalent disability of students with special educational needs in many mainstream classes, affecting around 9.7% of the school population in Hong Kong. The education of these students is therefore of great concern to the community. In the present paper research into dyslexia in the Chinese language is briefly…

There is general agreement that discourse markers help dialogue partners to highlight or locate available goal- or coherence-related information. There is, however, less agreement with regard to how the nature of the relation between the marked stretch of discourse and the rest of the dialogue should be defined. Recent work (Louwerse &…

The Language and Literature Division (LLD) is the largest of the six divisions of the Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong (HKU). It is currently home to 34 academic staff, who specialize either in the fields of Chinese Language, English Language and/or Literature Education, and to 60 full-time and 28 part-time doctoral students, who are…

This preliminary study examines the languages used by parents with their children in Malay, Chinese Foochow and Indian Tamil families to find out how the similarity or dissimilarity in parents' ethnic language influenced the choice of language transmitted to children and how far standard languages have permeated the family domain in Kuching City…

This study examines the music of Chinese American heritage, as portrayed in American music education from the late 19th century to the present. Specifically, representative music education materials, such as "Music Supervisors Journal," "Music Educators Journal," graded music series textbooks, and other available resource materials, were traced…