This study presents a psychometric evaluation of the Homework Management Scale (HMS) for mathematics, consisting of five subscales for measuring homework management strategies. Confirmatory factor analyses were conducted with a sample of middle school students (N = 796). Results indicated that the factor structure of the Chinese version of the HMS…

Over the past few decades, there has been considerable effort to find the mechanisms through which adult listeners can accommodate the rampant phonetic variation in natural speech. My dissertation concerns one source of variability: phonetic variation in speech produced by individuals with foreign accents. Mounting evidence shows that listeners…

Many students from China in U.S. universities have revealed their difficulties in using English in both communicative and academic contexts. Their difficulties have been a concern in the fields of academic practices and research studies. Accordingly, the current study was developed, to understand and support Chinese students in the U.S.…

This case study aimed to explore best practice in applying task-based language teaching (TBLT) via a Web-conferencing tool, Blackboard Collaborate, in a beginners' online Chinese course by evaluating the pedagogical values and limitations of the software and the tasks designed. Chapelle's (2001) criteria for computer-assisted language learning…

Arbitrary symbolism is a linguistic doctrine that predicts an orthogonal relationship between word forms and their corresponding meanings. Recent corpora analyses have demonstrated violations of arbitrary symbolism with respect to concreteness, a variable characterizing the sensorimotor salience of a word. In addition to qualitative semantic…

In our study we analyse how the same interactional dynamic is produced in two different pedagogical settings exploiting a desktop videoconference system. We propose to focus our attention on a specific type of conversational side sequence, known in the Francophone literature as sequences of normative evaluation. More particularly, we analyse data…

The study explores the effects of teacher support and student cohesiveness on foreign language (FL) learning outcomes and compares their effect with that of FL anxiety. One hundred and forty-six first-year Chinese undergraduates of Japanese, who were also learning English, participated in two surveys that were administered over a 2-month interval.…

This paper, drawing on the notion of symbolic competence and insights from complexity theory, investigates the multilingual practices of university students in group discussions. The data analysis reveals that the protagonists' language uses index the various ways in which their rehearsal of potential identities, language ideologies, histories,…

Using data from seven cohorts of language immersion lottery applicants in a large, urban school district, we estimate the causal effects of immersion programs on students' test scores in reading, mathematics, and science and on English learners' (EL) reclassification. We estimate positive intent-to-treat (ITT) effects on reading performance in…

This paper reports the results of a review of research articles on the teaching of Chinese as a second or foreign language published in four leading mainland Chinese journals during the years 2005-2015. The review found that Chinese language researchers are exploring a wide array of issues including language policy and planning, language learning…

This study explores adult education programmes under the auspices of multiculturalism at a Chinese cultural centre in Canada in helping immigrants with their cultural development and integration in Canadian society. The study employs an exploratory case study approach combining methods of document analysis and personal interviews. The findings…

In the present day Mandarin Chinese has become a commonly taught language in the U.S. Mandarin is widely taught in colleges and universities; K-12 Chinese programs, including immersion programs, have also grown rapidly. However, to date little research has been conducted on the latter programs. This study examines immersion programs in elementary…

Using data from seven cohorts of language immersion lottery applicants in a large, urban school district, we estimate the causal effects of immersion programs on students' test scores in reading, mathematics, and science, and on English learners' (EL) reclassification. We estimate positive intent-to-treat (ITT) effects on reading performance in…

Hong Kong attained champion of the PIRLS 2011 that aroused keen interest in understanding the underlying reasons of a non-alphabetic language. The study aimed at unravelling various aspects of the student and home factors which contributed to remarkable Chinese reading performance. Totally 3,875 students from 132 primary schools completed the…

This study investigates the effects of instruction on learners' pragmatic competence by integrating pragmatic consciousness-raising (PCR) activities into a beginning-level Chinese language course during one academic semester. The study also examines the effect of integrating the PCR activities, i.e., before or after the instruction of a…