Listening is a major challenge for many English-as-a-foreign language (EFL) learners. Decoding training, which helps learners develop the ability to recognize words from speech, is frequently used to assist EFL learners. Although recent empirical studies on decoding training have provided positive evidence on its effectiveness in improving EFL…

This study examines the intricate relationships between home language use, oral language skills (phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and receptive vocabulary), and literacy skills (word reading and spelling) in English and Chinese among young bilinguals. The sample includes 249 first-grade and 263 third-grade bilingual students in…

In telecollaboration research, scholars have broadened their focus from the purely linguistic details of online intercultural encounters to include its multimodal dimensions. Yet, no study to date has explored spatial repertoires, namely the totality of semiotic resources (e.g., speech, image, objects) embedded in a particular environment and used…

The developmental process of reading acquisition is frequently conceptualized as a self-organizing mental network consisting of lexico-semantic, phonological and orthographical components. The developmental nature of this network varies across languages and is known to impact second-language learners of typologically different languages. Yet, it…

Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students tend to experience delayed development of grammatical skills in written language. However, much remains unknown about the mechanism behind this phenomenon. In the present study, the researchers used a self-paced moving-window reading task to investigate DHH students' understanding of causal and adversative…

312 Singaporean children aged 4, 7, and 10 years from four different home language backgrounds--English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil--were tested for their recognition of animals and non-animals. The Malay-speaking group of children was the notable group that showed a different developmental pattern from the other three groups. They performed…

This study aimed to investigate how international students enrolled on medical and surgical bachelor's degree programs (MBBS) in China perceived online medical education course, compared to native Chinese students during the Covid-19 pandemic. The perceptions of 38 MBBS and 31 Chinese sophomores were surveyed using the Chaoxing platform. The…

With the present study I investigated the sources of score variance and dependability in a local oral English proficiency test for potential international teaching assistants (ITAs) across four first language (L1) groups, and suggested alternative test designs. Using generalizability theory, I examined the relative importance of L1s (i.e., Indian,…

This study proposed a set of measures for assessing noun phrase (NP) complexity in second language (L2) Chinese writing and compared the predictive power of these measures for L2 Chinese writing quality to that of a set of syntactic complexity measures based on the topic-comment unit (TC-unit). Our data consisted of 101 narratives written by…

Relative clause (RC) production is an important language milestone for children. Incorporating a felicitous context when assessing RC production is of theoretical and clinical value. This study investigated how a felicitous context influenced elicited production of RCs from monolingual English-speaking and bilingual Mandarin-English speaking…

Virtual reality (VR) for Language learning has been shown effective in improving students' communication skills. However very few studies reveal the communication strategies students used in communicating in a VR environment, especially in learning Chinese as a foreign or second language (CFL/CSL). In this pilot study, a prototype Virtual…

Recent global social unrest--anti-Asian violence in particular--was a wake-up call compelling Chinese language teachers to not only reflect on their emotions but also actively incorporate social justice in their curriculum and instruction. Yet, research on social justice in Chinese language classrooms is scarce. Building on recent work on teacher…

Testing of previously studied information potentiates subsequent learning of new information, a phenomenon referred to as the "forward testing effect" (FTE). The current study aimed to investigate the developmental trajectory of the FTE and whether the reset-of-encoding process contributes to the FTE. Younger children, older children,…

Previous experimental work shows that negation processing can be direct in bipolar contexts where positive/negative states of affairs can be expressed by available lexical opposites (remember/forget) in monolingual speakers. However, in a unipolar context where such opposites are not available (sing/not sing), the processing first proceeds through…

This study draws on data collected from Chinese language textbooks to investigate the ways in which ethnic minority cultures and languages are represented in primary school textbooks in China. Drawing on the methods of thematic and comparative analysis, we specifically analyse how the representation of ethnic minorities in Chinese textbooks has…