Creativity is not only for gifted students, but also for regular ones. This case study was aimed to analyze the appropriateness of tasks and the elaboration of multiple solutions to occasion fourth-graders' mathematical creative thinking through a documentary multiple-solution counting task in a figurative setting. The data came from the written…

This study investigated preschoolers' knowledge of Chinese characters by testing character structures on four levels: radical (character components), whole characters, characters in words and characters in sentences. A total of 107 preschool children between the ages of three and six from four nursery schools in Taiwan participated in the study.…

Approaches to learning a second/foreign language can be affected by such individual differences as personality traits, motivational variables, and task difficulty. Personality traits have been proven to influence academic achievement, but their effects on motivation and language learning approaches remain unanswered. The first purpose of the study…

This study compared individuals from two first language (L1) backgrounds (Italian, Mandarin) to determine how they may differ in their perception of Japanese consonant length (i.e. singleton vs. geminate) according to the phonemic status of length in L1 and experience with Japanese. The participants included two groups of non-native learners of…

This study investigates (1) whether second language learners (L2ers) acquire the Mandarin system of pronouns and reflexives despite differences from their first languages (L1s) and (2) whether L1-English and L1-Korean L2ers differ due to L1-transfer. Unlike English, Mandarin and Korean allow long-distance (LD) reflexives. While…

The purpose of this study was to explore how students with high- and low-prior-knowledge employed multiple representations in argumentation evaluation and generation tasks. The argumentation performance and eye-movement behaviors of 96 college students in these tasks were investigated. The number of participants who proposed complex argumentation…

Many learners of English as a foreign language often feel that learning spoken English is frustrating and quite difficult, especially when they have to talk to English-speaking foreigners. In general, because they are unfamiliar with the spoken mode of English and are worried about making grammatical errors, they often feel very scared to speak…

This study investigated the influence of focus-on-form task-based language teaching (TBLT) on Taiwanese children's English vocabulary acquisition and retention. Focus-on-form TBLT here refers to instruction in which the teacher and students interact, negotiate, and respond to each other on the subject of a second language (L2) vocabulary. The…

In the past decades, collaborative game-based learning has been used to facilitate students' learning in authentic learning contexts. Although several previous studies have reported the potential of this approach for students' learning performance and motivation, unequal participation could negatively influence the learning effectiveness of…

This study explores the relationship between the experience of confusion and the outcomes of Chinese character learning by learners of Chinese as a heritage language (CHL). Based on the claim that impasses triggering confusion can lead to deeper learning of conceptually difficult material, the study employed three impasse-driven tasks. The tasks…

Despite evidence on the interaction between cognitive individual differences (IDs) and task complexity, our knowledge of how affective IDs, such as foreign language enjoyment (FLE), interact with task complexity and other factors is limited. Since tasks and activities were found by Dewaele and MacIntyre (2014) to be most relevant to FLE, and since…

Mandarin speakers tend to adapt intervocalic nasals as either an onset of the following syllable (e.g. Bruno [right arrow] "bù.lu.nuò"), as a nasal geminate (e.g. Daniel [right arrow] "dan.ní.er"), or as one of the above forms (e.g. Tiffany [right arrow] "dì.fú.ní" or "dì.fen.ní"). Huang and Lin (2013, 2016)…

Local tour guides' English speaking competence determines inbound international tourists' travel experiences. This study investigated student tour guides' English learning by adopting role-play tasks. The communicative tasks were designed to explore how real interactions prepared English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners to become cultural…

In two artificial grammar learning experiments, we tested the learnability of tonal phonotactics forbidding non-domain-final rising tones (*NonFinalR) against the phonotactics banning non-domain-final high-level tones (*NonFinalH). We propose that a firm phonetic ground drives a presumably innate inductive bias favoring *NonFinalR and against…

Previous studies on spoken word production have shown that native English speakers used phoneme-sized units (e.g., a word-initial phoneme, C) to produce English words, and native Mandarin Chinese speakers employed syllable-sized units (e.g., a word-initial consonant and vowel, CV) as phonological encoding units in Chinese. With spoken word…