This study aimed to translate the Japanese version of the Life Skills Scale for Adolescents and Adults (LSSAA) into Chinese, English, and Korean, simplify it, and assess its reliability and validity. Validation was performed using individual data of 9941 high-school students from China, Japan, Korea, and the United States collected by the 2021…

Adult second language learners often show considerable individual variability in the ease with which lexical tones are learned. It is known that factors pertaining to a learner's first language (L1; such as L1 tonal status or L1 tone type) as well as extralinguistic factors (such as musical experience and working memory) modulate tone learning…

International kindergartens, which offer an immersive dual-language (English and Chinese) environment, are popular among middle-class families in Hong Kong. The international learning and teaching environment is cultivated primarily by developing a diverse workforce, in which Chinese-speaking (Putonghua and/or Cantonese) teachers with local…

Virtual reality is a rapidly developing technology and its applications are being explored in a variety of educational fields. While an increasing amount of attention is being paid to VR as a language learning tool, there remains less research on using VR with languages other than English. Adapting the Technology Acceptance Model, this study…

Past studies of the relation between teacher-student relationship (TSR) and students' academic achievement (SAA) yielded mixed results, so this study determined the overall link between TSR and SAA, along with their moderators. This three-level meta-analysis of 90 independent effect sizes in 74 empirical studies of 233,961 students showed an…

Purpose: This study aimed to examine how aging and modifications of critical acoustic parameters may affect the perception of whispered speech as a degraded signal. Method: Forty Mandarin-speaking adults were included in the study. Part 1 of the study compared the perception of Mandarin lexical tones, vowels, and syllables in older and younger…

The rapidly growing needs of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce have attracted educators and policymakers to reinforce STEM education from elementary to postsecondary education. Additionally, an increasing number of English language learners (ELLs) in the U.S. public education system draws educators' attention…

Quantitative social scientists have adopted the positivist epistemology and methodology of natural sciences, seeking objectivity, generalisability, and neutrality. However, in social sciences -- unlike in natural sciences -- humans are both the investigators and the object of investigation, leading to intricate interconnections between researchers…

Based on Jef Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, Lakoff's definition and Prince et al.'s classification of hedges, this paper takes New York Times and China Daily from January 23rd to April 8th, 2020 as corpus sources, randomly selects 39 COVID-19 reports, and makes a contrastive study of hedges among them, aiming at exploring the similarities and…

This paper presents the results of a retrospective study that investigates the cognitive effects of learning a foreign language in late adulthood. The learner group, consisting of 21 L1 Chinese speakers who have been learning to read Arabic for 2 years and 4 months, were compared to the matched group on their performance on a series of cognitive…

Writing in an L2 presents particular challenges (e.g., acculturating into new conventions) but also opportunities (e.g., the Joseph Conrad phenomenon, Scovel, 1988). In general, writing plays diverse roles in social, professional, and academic contexts and can significantly influence a writer's life experiences. Neither L1 nor L2 writers…

Production-oriented Approach (POA) is an indigenous pedagogy with Chinese characteristics proposed by Chinese linguistic professor Wen Qiufang. It is one of the most popular research hotspots in English teaching in China, aiming to solve the problems of the "input-output separation" and "instrumentality over humanity" in…

Language is conventional because word meanings are shared among different people. The present study examined Chinese infants' understanding of the language convention that different people should generalize words in the same way. Thirteen-month-old Mandarin-speaking Chinese infants repeatedly viewed a speaker providing a novel label for a target…

Recent research has demonstrated that abstract orthographic representations such as morphemes, syllables, and graphemes, influence handwritten production in languages with alphabetic scripts. The orthographic representations involved in the written production of non-alphabetic languages such as Chinese are less well understood. Chinese words…

English-medium instruction (EMI) has burgeoned alongside two decades of L2 self-regulated learning research. In both areas, listening remains under-researched, longitudinal designs are under-employed, and in-depth studies are necessary to unpack learner development. In a context believed to initiate self-regulated learning, the current study…