Purpose: The study aimed to examine whether oral reading prosody--the use of acoustic features (e.g., pitch and duration variations) when reading passages aloud--predicts reading fluency and comprehension abilities. Method: We measured vocabulary, syntax, word reading, reading fluency (including rate and accuracy), reading comprehension (in Grades…

Research Findings: This study investigated the bidirectional relations among paired associate learning (PAL), language-specific skills and Chinese word reading in kindergarten children from second year (K2) to third year (K3). We tested 204 children on four mapping conditions of PAL (i.e., visual-verbal, verbal-verbal, visual-visual, and…

Purpose: The study explored the barriers and enablers faced by language teachers in teaching 21st century skills at Chinese vernacular schools. It aimed to determine the effects of teachers' attitudes, barriers, and enablers in teaching the skills during language lessons. Method: A mixed-method design was used to achieve the two objectives of this…

This paper examines the discursive construction of Taiwan's envisioned identity as a Mandarin-English bilingual nation, encapsulated in its recent "2030 Bilingual Nation" policy. Through the lens of imagined community, this paper analyzes the blueprint for the policy to parse out the kinds of (international) ties the Taiwanese government…

In Dialogic syntax (cf. Du Bois 2014; Tantucci et al. 2018), naturalistic interaction is inherently grounded in resonance, viz. the catalytic activation of affinities across turns (Du Bois and Giora 2014). Resonance occurs dynamically when interlocutors creatively coconstruct utterances that are formally and phonetically similar to the utterance…

We closely replicated Wu and Ortega (2013), who found that an elicited imitation test (EIT) reliably distinguished low-level from high-level language abilities among instructed second language (L2) learners of Mandarin Chinese. The original study sampled learners: (1) from second-level courses to represent low-level language abilities; and (2)…

Individuals who arrive in a new country during their childhood and early adolescence are referred to as the 1.5 generation. In this exploratory case study, five Chinese families were interviewed and examined about the effects of their parenting styles on those 1.5 generation Chinese American students. Findings revealed that these parents'…

This study elicited and analyzed all the Chinese and English interrogatives from the Singapore Early Child Mandarin Corpus (132 children aged 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, and 5;6) to examine the effects and predictors of early bilingual development in Singapore preschoolers. The results indicated that: (1) there was significant age (but not gender) effect in…

To support the increasing numbers of Chinese language programs in the United States, there is a need to recruit and support highly qualified teachers. In this study, we described an online professional learning community (PLC) among a small group of Kindergarten Chinese teachers. All the teachers were visiting teachers with prior teaching…

Information and communications technology (ICT) is rapidly changing how we teach and how we learn. ICT can not only act as a teaching and learning aid but also reshape the delivery of instruction and bring about changes in education. Research has largely examined the effects of teacher education programs on their knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs…

A good command of referential skills has been seen as an effective indicator that reveals learners' discourse-related competence. However, in the realm of second language learning, a scant of attention has been paid to investigate L2 learners' referential skills in narratives. Therefore, the present study aims to address the gap through examining…

This study explores relationships between Taiwanese Sign Language (TSL) and Chinese reading comprehension with 65 deaf adults/youth (study 1: ages 14--50 years) and 27 deaf children (study 2: ages 6--13 years). Significant relationships were found between scores on two tests measuring TSL tasks. In study #1, the TSL tasks (measured by Taiwan Sign…

Video platform is not only a social tool but also an educational tool. The survey found that Vietnamese Chinese learners widely use YouTube to learn Chinese. However, there is not much research on it. Under the guidance of constructivism, language acquisition theory, and immersion theory, this study aims to explore the effectiveness of using…

Purpose: Children with cochlear implants (CIs) have less experience accessing spoken language. Mandarin Chinese uses pitch information to contrast word meaning, and the signal that the CI devices provide is degraded. Thus, Mandarin-speaking children with CIs may face more challenges in the development of language skills. This study examines…

Listeners use more than just acoustic information when processing speech. Social information, such as a speaker's race/ethnicity, can also affect listeners' understanding of the speech signal. In some cases, these social primes can facilitate perception, while in others they may inhibit perception. Indeed, a picture of an East Asian face has been…