The teaching and learning of Chinese remains a fragile undertaking across all stages of Australian schooling. This paper reports on a practitioner inquiry into pedagogic practices and student engagement with disadvantaged primary school students in a Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) classroom in Sydney, Australia. Drawing upon studies of affect…

Three kinds of knowledge that effective teachers should master have been proposed: content knowledge (CK), pedagogical knowledge (PK), and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Most PCK studies have been conducted in the mathematics or science domain. In recent years, a growing number of studies related to foreign language teachers' PCK have…

This study is a case study of the effects of tonal L1 on the acquisition of tonal L2, comparing two groups of tonal L1 learners, namely, Chinese Zhuang (C+Z) and Chinese non-Zhuang (C-Z) in the same classroom. The two groups of learners read aloud 60 words from a Thai wordlist, then their tone production was analyzed in two dimensions. The…

Purpose: Although acquisition of Chinese lexical tones by second language (L2) learners has been intensively investigated, very few studies focused on categorical perception (CP) of lexical tones by highly proficient L2 learners. This study was designed to address this issue with behavioral and electrophysiological measures. Method: Behavioral…

This study investigates the acoustic characteristics of Thai tones produced by Chinese students learning Thai through the "Tone Application", and conducts an attitude test towards the use of the Tone Application. A comparison of Thai tones pronounced by the participants with 40 native Thai speakers was also conducted. The acoustic…

This paper reports on a study investigating features related to Chinese linguistic complexities among international students enrolled in Chinese courses in China. The main objective of this study is to highlight the major feature of Chinese complexities encountered by international students and explore whether international students' native…

The teaching of spoken Chinese in the context of post-primary education in Ireland faces several complexities. Learners of Mandarin Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL), including both Irish and heritage learners, have demonstrated difficulty in learning spoken Chinese. This exploratory research is part of a larger project which aims to develop…

In this dissertation, I investigated how cognitive resources as well as formal, and informal language experience impact language learning in two studies. In the first study (Chapter 2), I examined the learning of Spanish grammatical gender by Chinese international students who were studying abroad in the US. The goal of that study was to uncover…

In English, positions of lexical stress in disyllabic words are associated with word categories; that is, nouns tend to be stressed more often on the first syllable, whereas verbs are more likely to be stressed on the second syllable (i.e. "sub"ject (noun) vs. sub"ject" (verb)). This phenomenon, which is called the stress…

Phonological awareness has been repeatedly reported as important for learning to read in different orthographies. It is important to understand what specific levels of phonological awareness are involved in Chinese and English for Chinese children who learn English-as-a-second-language (ESL). Measures of phonological awareness, word reading,…

Suggests an alternative to the traditional presentation of the tonal system in Chinese. Tones could be presented high-low (1,3) and rising-falling (2,4) instead of successively, since students have particular difficulty in this area. An acoustic and a statistical analysis is presented; the latter shows tonal distribution and frequency of…

To master the subtleties of Chinese takes years, but most Americans can learn some basic spoken and written Chinese in a matter of weeks or months. A new phonic system, Pin Yin Romanizing System, tones, structure, and characters, and a comparison of Japanese and Chinese are discussed. (MLW)

The visual exposure method for teaching tonal modulation can be used in the classroom where aural exposure time cannot be increased. The use of musical notation is a workable technique to begin with, using flashcards. Each flashcard has a character and the musical note that is linked with it. (CFM)

Investigation of native Chinese speakers' acquisition of French suprasegmental features found that the subjects not only perceived the different directions of pitch but also placed them in the right categories, in spite of the differences between the use of pitch in tonal and intonational languages. (34 references) (CB)

Examines the interference of Cantonese on the levels of phonology, syntax and lexis in Mandarin Chinese. The article offers remedial suggestions, discusses the special needs of Cantonese students, and compares them to the needs of their English-speaking counterparts. (Author/KM)