Since 2004, the Chinese government has planted Confucius Institutes that offer Chinese language and culture courses at colleges and universities around the world--including more than 100 in the United States. These Institutes avoid Chinese political history and human rights abuses, portray Taiwan and Tibet as undisputed territories of China, and…

As academic interest in Chinese complementary schools has grown, insufficient attention has been paid to the role and experiences of teachers working in these schools. This paper has drawn from accounts of Chinese complementary schoolteachers in London, together with the author's personal experiences of working as a teacher in one such school. The…

Different from the traditional term language input, affordance, an ecological term, has been deployed to analyze the perceived opportunities for second language (L2) learning an environment provides to L2 learners. L2 learning occurs only when the semiotic resources in the environment resonate with the learner's capacities such as their abilities,…

Studies of student satisfaction in higher education settings highlight the contribution of teaching, learning and assessment, institutional status, and the personal factors of self-efficacy, preparedness, and sense of community. Transnational partnership research has identified that similar student satisfaction factors are experienced by mainland…

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of contexts in the memory of meaning in foreign vocabularies. The study was based on the cognitive processing hierarchy theory of Craik and Lockhart (1972), the memory trace theory of McClelland and Rumelhart (1986) and the memory trace theory of cognitive psychology. The subjects were non-English…

In English, positions of lexical stress in disyllabic words are associated with word categories; that is, nouns tend to be stressed more often on the first syllable, whereas verbs are more likely to be stressed on the second syllable (i.e. "sub"ject (noun) vs. sub"ject" (verb)). This phenomenon, which is called the stress…

This study was designed to explore the experiences of Chinese international students attending a research university in the United States, from the time they received offers of acceptance to study abroad until they left China (pre-arrival period) through the end of their first quarter as freshmen (early post-arrival period). The researcher sought…

Rater variation in performance assessment can impact test-takers' scores and compromise assessments' fairness and validity (Crooks, Kane, & Cohen, 1996). Rater variation can also undermine a test's validity and fairness; therefore, it is important to investigate raters' scoring patterns in order to inform rater training. Substantial work has…

Popular opinion has long assumed that learning a foreign language requires not only traditional classroom instruction but also immersion among native speakers of the language. This opinion is so strongly held that students who study through immersion are believed to become more proficient than those who do not. "Study Abroad Contexts for…

Most studies on bilingual phonological awareness suggested that children who were able to speak a second language performed better in phonological awareness tasks; some studies however found different results. This study revisited the issue by investigating the effect of Min dialect experience on Chinese children's Mandarin phonological awareness.…

Parafoveal semantic processing has recently been well documented in reading Chinese sentences, presumably because of language-specific features. However, because of a large variation of fixation landing positions on pretarget words, some preview words actually were located in foveal vision when readers' eyes landed close to the end of the…

This thesis examines reflexive pronouns, such as Icelandic "sig" (Cf. Thrainsson 2007), which may be bound from outside of an infinitive clause (which I call MD "medium distance" binding) in addition to being bound locally. I propose that such reflexives are linked to their antecedents via sisterhood followed by movement: the…

This thesis investigates the nature of grammatical patterns through an in-depth study of resultative constructions in Mandarin and Thai. At the heart of the thesis lies the proposal that event structure templates--complex, meaning-based grammatical patterns--must be recognised as primary objects of linguistic analysis. As content-theoretic objects…

Asian American immigrant parents supporting children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has been understudied. The purpose of this qualitative study was to probe the perceptions of Mandarin-speaking immigrant mothers and fathers raising children with ASD in the United States. Ten participating parents were first-generation native…

This study was designed to determine if language acquisition can occur in a virtual situation in the absence of explicit instruction. After spending 1 year establishing a virtual community, the authors observed and analyzed interpersonal interactions and the development of Chinese communication competence, communication models, and interaction…