Recent psycholinguistic findings showed that (a) a multi-modal phonetic training paradigm that encodes visual, interactive information is more effective in training L2 learners' perception of novel categories, (b) decreasing the acoustic variance of a phonetic dimension allows the learners to more effectively shift the perceptual weight towards…

Since 1997, the "biliterate and trilingual" policy has been adopted by the Hong Kong government, and is now guiding the curriculum design in Hong Kong primary schools. This language policy aims to ensure that Hong Kong students become biliterate (written English and Chinese) and trilingual (spoken English, Cantonese and Putonghua).…

This paper reported findings on a contrastive analysis of epistemic expressions in argumentative essays between NS and NNS Chinese L2 writers. Based on an examination of a NS corpus and a NNS learner corpus across four proficiency levels, the study shows there is great similarity in the total number of epistemic devices used per thousand words…

Studies in interlanguage pragmatics have shown that L2 learners' proficiency has an influence on the occurrences of L1 pragmatic transfer. However, questions remain whether the relationship between L1 pragmatic transfer and L2 proficiency is positive or negative. This paper is designed to study L1 pragmatic transfer in requests made by Chinese…

How bilinguals' two languages interact with each other has stimulated considerable research. However, little of this research has focused on objective measures of speech production. This study aims to investigate bilinguals' production of Guoyu and Taiwanese voiceless sibilant fricatives to see how language contact and language dominance influence…

This dissertation examines the participation of one Chinese teacher and five 13 to 15 year-old Chinese heritage students in a classroom in a Chinese community school during group discussions about narrative texts. In this study, the teacher used Collaborative Reasoning (CR) (Anderson, et al., 2001) to help the Chinese heritage students extend…

The use of specific speech acts have been found to vary with culture, thus to perform a speech act successfully in a second language requires not only linguistic competence but also pragmatic competence of the L2 community. Though previous studies have shown dissimilarities in invitational conversations and general refusal strategies (c.f.…

As increasing numbers of Chinese language learners choose to learn English online, there is a need to investigate popular websites and their language learning designs. This paper reports on the first stage of a study that analyzed the pedagogical, linguistic, and content features of 25 Chinese English Language Learning (ELL) websites ranked…

Poems are usually expressed with elaborate rhetoric techniques, which make them hard to be understood. In this study, a cross-text annotation sharing mechanism is proposed to help students comprehend poetry by creating and sharing individual annotations. Furthermore, relevant annotations among various texts can be retrieved to stimulate and help…

This study examined the relationship among word reading efficiency, text reading fluency, and reading comprehension for adult English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. Data from 185 adult Chinese EFL learners preparing to take the Test-of-English-as-a-Foreign-Language[TM] (TOEFL[R]) were analyzed in this study. The participants completed a…

What are the longitudinal cognitive profiles of Hong Kong Chinese children with specific reading difficulties in Chinese only, in English only, or both? A total of 16 poor readers each of Chinese (PC) and English (PE) and 8 poor readers of both orthographies (PB) were compared to a control sample (C) of 16 children; all were drawn from a…

This paper reports on an investigation of the potential for a shared-L1 advantage on an academic English listening test featuring speakers with L2 accents. Two hundred and twelve second-language listeners (including 70 Mandarin Chinese L1 listeners and 60 Japanese L1 listeners) completed three versions of the University Test of English as a Second…

The open educational resource (OER) movement has reached a critical mass due to recent technology advancements. In Taiwan, to overcome the language barrier, the Opensource Opencourse Prototype System (OOPS) plays a significant role in enabling Chinese-speaking users to benefit from this global education movement. However, our understanding about…

Much of teacher knowledge research in teacher education has focused on Western views of teacher knowledge. By reporting on a case study of an immigrant Chinese language teacher's personal practical knowledge in teaching secondary school students, this paper presents an Eastern view of teacher knowledge, and illustrates how knowledge and identity…

How proficiency in reading the first language (L1) influences proficiency in reading in the second language (L2) was explored in this study. Reading scores in Mandarin Chinese (L1) and in English (L2) for 30,000 Taiwanese ninth-grade students were randomly selected from all who took the national Basic Competency Test during a 6-year period in…