Lyle F. Bachman is Professor, Department of Applied Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles. He is a past president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics and of the International Language Testing Association. He has published numerous articles and books in the areas of language testing, program evaluation, and second…

Learning the Chinese tone system is a major challenge to students of Chinese as a second or foreign language. Part of the problem is that the spoken Chinese syllable presents a complex perceptual input that overlaps tone with segments. This complexity can be addressed through directing attention to the critical features of a component (tone in…

Educational success among Asian American students has often been misunderstood as an occupational development separate from any experience of racism. However, several theorists have suggested that racial barriers in occupational mobility correlate with educational pursuits. Therefore, this research aims to examine the direct effect of perceived…

The linguistic relativity hypothesis proposes that speakers of different languages perceive and conceptualize the world differently, but do their brains reflect these differences? In English, most nouns do not provide linguistic clues to their categories, whereas most Mandarin Chinese nouns provide explicit category information, either…

The lure of entering the China "market" has led numerous North American colleges and universities to open campuses or offices on Chinese soil--in anticipation of bolstering enrollment numbers, wooing a promising supply of Chinese students, and offering their American or other international students the opportunity to live and study…

In today's second language classrooms, students are often asked to work in pairs or small groups. Such collaboration can take place face-to-face, but now more often via computer mediated communication. This paper reports on a study which investigated the effect of the medium of communication on the nature of pair interaction. The study involved…

We examined familial and cultural factors predicting parent-child (dis)agreement on child behavior and parenting problems. Immigrant Chinese parents (89.7% mothers; M age = 44.24 years) and their children (62 boys; 57.9%) between the ages of 9 and 17 years (M = 11.9 years, SD = 2.9) completed measures of parent punitive behavior and child…

In late 2008, the Australian Government announced funding for a national collaborative project to develop a curriculum framework for courses of study in Chinese (Mandarin), Indonesian, Japanese, and Korean for "heritage speakers" of these languages at the senior secondary school level. This article examines some of the issues surrounding…

This study examined in a cross-cultural context mothers' discussions of mental states and external behaviors in a story-telling task with their 3-year-old children and the relations of such discussions to children's emotion situation knowledge (ESK). The participants were 71 European American and 60 Chinese immigrant mother-child pairs in the…

This study investigates the question of whether language background affects the perception of lexical stress in English. Thirty native English speakers and 30 native Chinese learners of English participated in a stressed-syllable identification task and a discrimination task involving three types of stimuli (real words/pseudowords/hums). The…

This interview study interrogates how cultural values of filial piety inform Chinese American daughters-in-law's understanding of their relationship and power dynamics with immigrant Chinese American mothers-in-law. Ideals of filial respect accord limited authority to mothers-in-law, who engage other mechanisms of power, such as their domestic…

Background: Cigarette smoking is a health-risk behavior of global proportions. Self-efficacy plays an important role in both smoking acquisition and smoking resistance. Reliability and validity of an instrument is fundamental to research results, particularly in its simplified form on a different population. The purpose of this study was to…

This review evaluates the role of language--specifically, the Chinese-based system of number words and the simplicity of Chinese mathematical terms--in explaining the relatively superior performance of Chinese and other East Asian students in cross-national studies of mathematics achievement. Relevant research is critically reviewed focusing on…

Hong Kong popular culture played an important role in the construction and consolidation of Hong Kong identity long before the handover to China. In the past few years leading up to the 10th anniversary of the handover, both Hong Kong and China have undergone numerous changes which seem to be changing their relations. Whilst Hong Kong people had…

There is ample evidence that Confucianism is undergoing a multi-faceted revival in contemporary China. This can be seen in government slogans, in a runaway best seller on the "Analects" (the compendium of Confucius's teachings), in educational experiments, and in academic activities. The twentieth century was a bad century for…