This study aimed to further understanding of immersion language development by examining in-class freewriting, classroom-assessed reading, and year-end STAMP 4Se proficiency levels in 4th-grade Chinese immersion over an academic year. Specifically, we aimed to understand (1) how learners express themselves in freewriting, (2) growth in freewriting…

Background: Technology advancement changes not only interpreting practices but also its pedagogy, which has long been criticised for lacking authenticity in/out-of-classroom practices. Objective: This empirical research aims to develop a mobile-assisted language learning application powered by extended reality (XR). Shortened as 'XR MALL', this…

Chinese immersion programs have been increasingly popular in US schools. However, we have insufficient data on young English-speaking children's acquisition of Chinese as a second language in these programs, and specifically on social contextual variables systematically promoting or hindering Chinese language use. Taking a variationist…

Numerous complexities undergird how parents support the bilingual development of their young learners, especially in a predominantly monolingual-centric society. In this article, we highlight belief practices which informed parents' decision-making processes in supporting their children, who were enrolled in a diverse dual language immersion…

Language learning has long been one of the most challenging issues facing non-Chinese speaking (NCS) students who are mainly ethnic minorities immersed in a multilingual environment in Hong Kong. Previous research on the education of NCS students suggested that early support from an immersion programme at a pre-school age may contribute to higher…

Children learning Chinese must cope with an opaque orthography lacking transparent relations between oral pronunciations and written characters: a challenge heightened for L2 learners. Use of digital Pinyin input may facilitate connections between oral and written language by allowing learners to access vocabulary they cannot yet write. We…

With the promise of achieving bilingualism, biliteracy, and cultural pluralism, Chinese immersion programs for students from kindergarten to 12th grade (K-12) in North America, especially the US, have been proliferating in the past two decades. Research on this rapidly growing population of non-native Chinese learners is also growing. This…

This study reviews the emerging studies on the topic of Chinese immersion programs in the U.S. The effectiveness of Chinese immersion programs has been proved to have positive impacts on students' language proficiency, academic performance, and cognitive development. However, challenges in curriculum and instructions, behavior management, and…

While translanguaging has been adequately researched in various educational sectors, there is scant research at the primary-level English-L2 classroom in the Chinese educational context. Within a monolingual English-only immersion policy favoured by the state in China for many decades now, translanguaging has been a debated issue recently. Within…

To support the increasing numbers of Chinese language programs in the United States, there is a need to recruit and support highly qualified teachers. In this study, we described an online professional learning community (PLC) among a small group of Kindergarten Chinese teachers. All the teachers were visiting teachers with prior teaching…

This book explores the framework of Intercultural Citizenship within a variety of US teaching and learning contexts. The chapters, which comprise both conceptual pieces and empirical research studies, represent a wide variety of languages at levels ranging from beginner to advanced, from early elementary through higher education contexts. They…

The purpose of this study is to examine the professional development (PD) needs of Chinese dual language immersion program (DLI) educators, particularly the PD supports these teachers receive. This instrumental case study examined the professional learning of four Chinese language DLI teachers through semi-structured interviews and observations of…

This study explores the effectiveness of current teacher preparation program that prepare dual language immersion teachers and identifies effective professional development training approach for teachers under the layer of culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogical practices. Through a qualitative phenomenology approach that includes…

Chinese as the medium of instruction (MOI) is used across the curriculum for early childhood education in Hong Kong; however, kindergartens with non-Chinese speaking (NCS) students adopt different MOI, in which English remains an integral part of learning and teaching, to cater to the needs of NCS students and their families. The present study…

The purpose of this multiple-paper dissertation is to design a digital game and stealth assessments within the game to assess young second language learners' Chinese reading proficiency. In Chapter 2 (Paper 1), I describe the game designed for this dissertation and how it was implemented in a dual language immersion classroom. This study found…