Reports a study of the learning strategies and processes of four adult learners of Chinese, using data collected over a two-year period. Students showed a number of different approaches to learning, not all of which could be classified "good language learner" strategies. Findings suggest areas for exploration in immersion education, especially…

Presents 30 adult Chinese immigrant women's accounts of their experiences with, and perceptions of, learning English as a Second Language in Canada. Results from interviews with two age groups of adult women reveal the complexity of adult second-language acquisition, which involves factors pertaining both to the learners, and to the social context…

Presents a case study of a Hong Kong Chinese adult survivor of brother-sister incest. Discusses her symptoms, feelings toward incest, parental response at disclosures, and implications for practice. Also discusses Chinese cultural influences that affect the family and lead to secrecy and shame. (CR)

A Modern Language Association survey of enrollment trends in U.S. colleges found that Spanish, French, and German remain the three most popular language courses. Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic have shown greatest increases between 1960-95. The Less Commonly Taught Languages project provides information, including instructional materials and web…

To test whether cognitive processing in bilingual depends on script combinations and language proficiency, this study investigated the development of alphabetic and logographic visual search strategies in two kinds of biscriptals: (1) Malay-English and (2) Chinese-English readers. Results support the view that there are script implications of…

Reports the results of a study on the intonation of 18 Mandarin Chinese speakers lecturing in English. The study investigated the hypothesis that the nonnative speakers who were able to use the intonation system of English most effectively would score higher on a global language test. (Author/JL)

Examined Hong Kong primary schoolchildren's self-concept in several domains over two years. Found that younger children had higher self-concept than older. Self-concept dropped drastically from grade one to three and leveled off thereafter. Girls had higher self-concepts than boys but had a greater drop. Self-concept level predicted depression,…

Examines knowledge of semantics-syntax correspondences in second-language acquisition (SLA) within the Principles and Parameters framework. A parameter of semantic structure is used to investigate change of state locatives and "psychological" verbs. Results indicate that for some learners, first-language influence persists until advanced stages of…

Investigated whether topic-prominence transfer is a universal developmental stage or a transferable typology by analyzing the behavior of 46 native speakers of English learning Chinese, a subject-prominence (SP) language, as a second language. Results found that the learners displayed a process of systematically transferring English SP features to…

Results of a survey of the world view of female white clients, white counselors, and Chinese international students showed significant differences. Income was a significant predictor of world views for clients, while age and marital status contributed strongly to those of counselors. Among the Chinese students, the Taiwanese and the Mainland…

Explores the role of play in early-childhood education in China. Describes a typical day in the life of one Chinese child enrolled in a preprimary program. Cites research findings on which daily activities were perceived as play by the child, her parents, grandparents, and teacher. Concludes with a discussion about the impact of culture on…

Focuses on how Chinese writers of academic texts in English have a tendency to place topic-fronting devices and logical connectors in sentence-initial position when introducing new information. A corpus of academic writing by Chinese subjects was tagged o detect occurrences of the above. (Author/VWL)

Re-examines the case of the "pseudo-passive," an interlanguage structure considered typical of first-language Chinese learners of second language English. Earlier approaches to the analysis of the structure--typological and syntactic--are reviewed and an alternative approach--discourse-syntactic--is proposed to bridge a methodological…

Explores different ways of transcribing a fragment of classroom discourse, showing how these ways determine the resulting analysis and what emerges from it. Identifies three distinct "frames" of classroom interaction, which are referred to as lesson, lesson-support, and commentary. (Author/VWL)

The effect of bilingualism on the development of phonological awareness of Chinese children was investigated in 2 studies comparing bilingual speakers of both Cantonese and Mandarin with monolingual speakers of Mandarin. Cantonese-speaking children had developed more advanced onset and rime awareness by 2nd grade as they learned Mandarin in school…