This paper, which employs a narrative method, draws upon my personal experiences of L1 (Chinese) and L2 (English) literacy acquisition through a particular era--China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, during which time regular schooling was interrupted. In this paper, I seek to illustrate that the process of acquiring literacy reflects…

English has become the medium for communication in so many areas, and children are the hope of the future and shoulder the duties to structure the future. Children's English becomes more important and spreads all over the world, especially in recent years. The children's English is not perfect and it exists its own disadvantages, so this paper…

Purpose: Student dropout rates have been a source of contention throughout many Universities worldwide. Universities recognize this fact and many have acted to improve their induction process for students joining the University in the first year. However, student dropout rates continue to be higher than acceptable and it is in this context that…

Background: The mixed findings of previous studies on the nature and effects of performance goals have led to a call for re-examination of the dichotomous framework of achievement goal orientation theory. While the call for a revised achievement goal orientation theory has received considerable discussion in Western studies, it is not clear…

How do adults adapt when they have been inculcated into a particular philosophy of parenting and education and are then expected to adjust to a cultural framework possibly at odds with their worldview? Mainland Chinese fathers represent one immigrant group that has had to successfully learn to navigate various challenges while interacting with…

This paper explores the role of language awareness (LA) in the learning experience of students on a one-year full-time master's programme in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) in Britain. It shows how LA drives their general English language knowledge and academic literacy skills, and supports an appropriate learner identity…

Five and a half years after the 2001 terrorist attacks, colleges are still struggling to respond to demands from the government, businesses, and students for more teaching of the languages believed to be critical to America's security and economic future. Arabic is considered essential for representing America's interests in the Middle East, but…

The dual-route model offers a popular way to classify developmental dyslexia into phonological and surface subtypes. The current study examined whether this dual-route model could provide a framework for understanding the varieties of Chinese developmental dyslexia. Three groups of Chinese children (dyslexics, chronological-age controls, and…

This study aimed to develop a set of quantitative instruments to investigate Hong Kong Chinese language teachers' orientation to reading instruction, their instructional practices and the relation between these two constructs under the implementation of the new curriculum. A total of 493 Chinese language teachers from 170 secondary schools in Hong…

An all-volunteer organization called the Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (OOPS), headquartered in Taiwan, was initially designed to translate open source materials from MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) site into Chinese. Given the recent plethora of open educational resources (OER), such as the OCW, the growing use of such resources by the…

A history of social justice in education is useful for at least two reasons. First, competing notions of social justice in education are not new. Tension between a belief in assimilation and the ability of individuals to climb the meritocratic ladder and the belief in a respect for cultural and linguistic differences and a flattening of the…

This study looks at whether conventional and anomalous metaphors are processed in different locations in the brain while being read when compared with a literal condition in Mandarin Chinese. We find that conventional metaphors differ from the literal condition with a slight amount of increased activation in the right inferior temporal gyrus. In…

This study used the marginal man theory to try to understand the work experiences of a group of Chinese immigrant professors at American institutions of higher education. Marginal man theory describes an individual with dual, perhaps not resolvable identities in two cultures. Five male professors at a Midwestern university participated in the…

Texts in spoken Standard Chinese were developed to improve and update Chinese materials and to reflect current usage in Beijing and Taipei. The focus is on communicating in Chinese in practical situations. The overall course is organized into 10 situational modules, student workbooks, and resource modules. This workbook covers the money and…

In an examination of some relationships between culture, assertiveness, decisionmaking, and self image among Chinese Americans, this paper focuses on themes such as: (1) how cultural factors impinge on individual capability to be assertive; (2) specific ways in which cultural conditioning affects decisionmaking skills and other behavior patterns;…