How do early bilingual experiences influence children's neural architecture for word processing? Dual language acquisition can yield common influences that may be shared across different bilingual groups, as well as language-specific influences stemming from a given language pairing. To investigate these effects, we examined bilingual English…

When reading Chinese, skilled native readers regularly gain a preview benefit (PB) when the parafoveal word is orthographically or semantically related to the target word. Evidence shows that non-native, beginning Chinese readers can obtain an orthographic PB during Chinese reading, which indicates the parafoveal processing of low-level visual…

This study used an eye-tracking method to examine whether Chinese translation equivalents activated by English prime words can continue to activate their Chinese homophones. With 30 English prime words, and 60 Chinese target words as materials, the experiment used a Tobii eye-tracking device to collect data from 30 university students while…

Morphological awareness has been assessed longitudinally for monolinguals and bilinguals to trace the developmental trend. Researchers have found the important role it plays in literacy development including vocabulary growth and reading development. Conclusions about the important role morphological awareness play in literacy development are…

Growing up in the digital era, young children are exposed to numerous educational applications and programs, some with well-designed curricula and others focused more on entertainment or game-like qualities. With the increasing popularity of mobile language-learning applications among young children, this dissertation raises a crucial question: do…

Linguistic input in multi-lingual/-cultural contexts is highly variable. We examined the production of English and Malay laterals by fourteen early bilingual preschoolers in Singapore who were exposed to several allophones of coda laterals: Malay caregivers use predominantly clear-l in English and Malay, but their English coda laterals can also be…

Dative alternation between prepositional and double object datives has been a popular topic in second language (L2) acquisition, but only few studies deal with discourse constraints such as the "given-before-new" principle, or given-new (GN) ordering, which describes the tendency to place given information before new information. The…

As an important instructional affordance, teacher written feedback is widely used in second language (L2) writing contexts. While copious evidence has shown that such a pedagogical practice can facilitate L2 learners' writing performance, especially their writing accuracy, little is known about how novice writing teachers conceptualize and enact…

This study explored second language (L2) competence in discontinuous discursive formulaic sequences, namely Chinese correlative connectives (CCCs; e.g. yinwei . . . suy 'because . . . so'), in relation to the determinants of formulaic sequence acquisition by scrutinizing L2 Chinese learners' performance on two controlled tasks. Mixed-effects…

A key pedagogical goal in any classroom is to engage students in learning. This study examines how an English-Medium-Instruction (EMI) teacher employs available resources to engage his students in the classroom for promoting participation, keeping the lesson moving forward and meeting the pedagogical goals. The data for this study is based on a…

In line with China's vision for international education, English medium instruction (EMI) is booming in Chinese higher education, which positions Chinese students in circumstances where they need to negotiate among different commitments, roles, identities, and desires involving individual, national and international agendas. This paper draws on…

This article focuses on cultured identity construction via linguistic stylization among young domestic and external Chinese migrants. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing, China and the Netherlands, this study contends that self-defined "Hanfu" fans stylize the classical "Wenyan" register to invoke and align with a…

Taiwanese students learn Chinese from 3 years old using Bopomofo (Zhuyin Fuhao), but they still struggle with spelling and reading, even in middle school. Thus, we guided students still struggling to read Chinese text to use their logical skills and creativity to incorporate the Bopomofo phonetic alphabet into the Rummikub strategy board game.…

This study explores how preservice English teachers in China perceive and leverage their Chinese and English linguistic repertoires in ELT methodology training, and how a reflective understanding of their use of these repertoires can contribute to their development as teachers. To understand how their practices and conceptualizations of language…

The increasingly diverse population of young children in the U.S. requires innovative culturally and linguistically sustaining literacy practices in early childhood education. Through parent-child ethnography, we share two stories of a multilingual and multicultural mother and daughter who created and enacted new storytelling practices in the…