A Mandarin/English two-way immersion elementary program is described from its inception and implementation through the fifth grade, the culminating year of the program. All students in all grades were assessed on their oral/listening, reading, and writing performance in Mandarin using program-created assessment measures. Fifth-grade students also…

This study surveys 200 Malay students enrolled in three Chinese primary schools in relation to three issues, i.e., parental choice of schooling, learning processes and inter-ethnic friendship patterns. The three issues are explored through a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies. Parental expectations for their…

This mix-methods study examined the language anxiety levels that the Chinese international students perceived in second language (L2) academic context at four universities in the northeastern region of the United States of America; it explored the impact of language anxiety that these students perceived on their academic learning; it also…

One important task of any semantic theory of plurals is to account for the collective/distributive ambiguity. The goal of this dissertation is to achieve greater understanding of plurality and the collectivity/distributivity distinction from a cross-linguistic perspective by examining the phenomenon of distributivity in Mandarin Chinese. I show…

This thesis investigates the relationship between the phonological distribution of Cw combinations, and the acoustic/perceptual distinctiveness between syllables with plain C onsets and with Cw combination onsets. Distributional asymmetries of Cw combinations discussed in this thesis include the avoidance of Cw combinations in the labial consonant…

Children use syntax as well as observations of events to learn verb meanings. This is known as syntactic bootstrapping. This dissertation investigated the origins and mechanisms of syntactic bootstrapping. Prior evidence suggested that two-year-olds, but not younger children, could use aspects of sentence structure to assign different…

This study looks at the language use, attitudes, and identity in relation to Philippine English among young generation Filipinos through a questionnaire survey of a selected group of students from a Philippine private university. The survey findings would reveal that most domains of use and verbal activities are dominated by English as the…

Children often produce nonadult responses to sentences with the focus operator only, such as "Only the cat is holding a flag." For example, children often accept this sentence as a description of a situation in which a cat holds a flag and a duck holds both a flag and a balloon. One proposed analysis, by Paterson, Liversedge, Rowland & Filik…

In recent years, more and more elderly citizens have begun using mobile phones. However, most text presentations on mobile phones are not suitable for those whose vision has declined with age. The objective of this study was to discover how different Chinese text spacing would affect older adults' reading performance (time and error), text…

The focus of this study is to explore the lifestyle of international students and also the difficulties faced by them due to the language barrier (difficulty in learning the Chinese language) in Taiwan. Motivation for this study comes from the increasing number of international students, and the related educational policy settings of the…

This study investigates attitudes and motivation that influence heritage and non-heritage students' learning of Chinese as a second language, examining the similarities and differences among three subgroups: bilingual, heritage motivated, and non-heritage learners. The study uses the socio-educational model by Gardner (1985), the internal…

Generational cultural gaps (assessed as the mismatch between adolescents' ideals and perceptions of the parent-adolescent relationship) were investigated among Chinese youth with immigrant parents and their European American counterparts who have been in the United States for generations and assumingly do not have intergenerational cultural gaps.…

Because Chinese character learning typically relies heavily on rote character copying, we tested independent copying skill in third- and fourth-grade Chinese children with and without dyslexia. In total, 21 Chinese third and fourth graders with dyslexia and 33 without dyslexia (matched on age, nonverbal IQ, and mother's education level) were given…

Under the influence of globalization, English has almost become the default language in scientific academia. While the culture-independent nature of scientific research may result in scholars' preference for using one common language, over-reliance on English may shape non-English-speaking scholars' negative attitudes toward their national…

Arabic and Chinese are 2 of 13 languages designated as "critical" by the U.S. Department of State. There is an urgent need to expand the teaching force in these languages. Understanding how best to prepare critical language teachers from abroad is imperative. This study examined the perceptions of 16 pre- and in-service teachers (6 Arabic and 10…