There is a trend towards the shift of the Uyghur language as the language of instruction in schools in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. This article presents several examples of such a shift first and then it reviews the concept of language rights (LR) and applies them to the current situation of the Uyghur language in education…

This study explored the effectiveness of a self-access website as a tool to teach expressions of gratitude to learners of Mandarin Chinese. The web-based instruction included explicit instruction on how to express gratitude appropriately in Mandarin and various consciousness-raising exercises/activities. Two groups of learners who differed in…

In order to extend previous research on the twofold multidimensionality of academic self-concept (i.e. its domain-specific structure and separation into competence and affect components), the present study tests its generalisability among vocational students from mainland China. A Chinese version of self-description questionnaire I was…

Background: While previous studies have shown that children affected by dyslexia exhibit a deficit in categorical perception of segmental features in alphabetic languages, it remains unclear whether the categorical perception deficit generalizes to nonalphabetic languages at the suprasegmental level. In this study, we investigated the occurrence…

Semantic preview benefit from parafoveal words is critical for proposals of distributed lexical processing during reading. Semantic preview benefit has been demonstrated for Chinese reading with the boundary paradigm in which unrelated or semantically related previews of a target word "N" + 1 are replaced by the target word once the eyes cross an…

The boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) was used to examine whether high level information affects preview benefit during Chinese reading. In two experiments, readers read sentences with a 1-character target word while their eye movements were monitored. In Experiment 1, the semantic relatedness between the target word and the preview word was…

The current study investigated whether bilingualism affects the processing of sub-lexical representations specifying the sound structure of words. Spanish-English bilinguals, Mandarin-English bilinguals, and English-only monolinguals repeated English tongue twisters. Twister materials had word or nonword targets (thus varying in whether lexical…

One of the reasons often advanced for the study of Western civilization is its history of scientific and technical prowess. Advances in science and technology have resulted in the many conveniences of modern life: air travel, automobiles, and smart phones, to name just a few. These are fruits of the Baconian project, which emphasized observation…

This study examined how Chinese children acquire the untaught positional constraints of stroke patterns that are embedded in left-right structured and top-bottom structured characters. Using an orthographic regularity pattern elicitation paradigm, 536 Hong Kong Chinese children at different levels of reading (kindergarten, 2nd, and 5th grades)…

Chinese migrants have been a rich source of influential international literature, represented by key works such as "Eat a Bowl of Tea" by Louis Chu in 1961 and "The Joy Luck Club" by Amy Tan in 1989. Cultural differences and conflicts, stereotypes and other complex issues regarding the diasporic lives of the Chinese sojourners…

In an increasingly multi-territorialized and interdependent world, people are getting more in touch with each other than ever before through many mass media services. This provides the possibility to overcome geographical boarders in order to build new relationships that foster mutual interests in economical and socio-cultural aspects from…

Request for information (RfI) is believed to be the universally dominant function of young children's questioning, whereas request for action (RfA) has been reported to be the leading interrogative form used in early child Cantonese. The possibility of crosslinguistic variability prompts further research and comparison with additional languages.…

The present research aims to identify the factors involved in the successful completion of the "Young Chinese Test" 2-A1 (YCT 2-A1) at Spanish Confucius Institute (Canary Islands). Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) entails several learning difficulties compared with other European languages. This study was conducted on 61 monolingual…

Educating minority people has been a subject of multicultural education and is still practised in a framework of the nation-state. Multicultural education guarantees opportunities for minority people's education and tries to preserve their culture, but it is often a controversial point between the majority and minority. In a multicultural society,…

Purpose: We examined the association of bilingual exposure with structural and pragmatic language development in Chinese children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Method: The parents of 54 children with ASD exposed to 1 (n = 31) or 2 (n = 23) Chinese languages completed (a) a questionnaire to evaluate their child's competence in structural…