Teaching Chinese as a foreign language (TCFL) is increasingly becoming a mainstream profession and an independent academic discipline. However, there is little research in CALL targeting the Chinese language to date. This research attempts to show how a CALL system can be constructed following the unique properties of the Chinese language so it…

This article reports the results of an experiment designed to investigate the effectiveness of pinyin (a phonic transcription system) in learning vocabulary of Chinese as a second language from the perspective of cognitive load theory. In the reported experiment, the learning effects of the vertical and horizontal layouts of characters, pinyin,…

This survey study, which involved 108 language learners enrolled in first-year Chinese as a foreign language classrooms in the United States, intended to address the research questions, "What types of Chinese-character learning strategies do US learners use?" and "Do US learners' Chinese-character learning strategy use differ based on the…

Much attention has been paid in the literature to matters of script choice vis-a-vis languages. This attention, however, has focused on script choice in a national and political context. By contrast, there has not been any significant attention paid to more local and idiosyncratic instances of script choice operating on an individual and community…

This study compares second-year Japanese university students' strategies to write kanji by hand with their strategies to produce the kanji characters on a computer, taking into account factors such as accuracy in writing, the amount of kanji used, the complexity of the kanji used, as well as how the characters used compare with the sequence…

The purpose of this study was twofold. First, this study was conducted to compare English communicative competency achievement between two different models of instruction. Adult English language learners (AELLs) participated in either the communicative task-based (CTB) or in a more traditional (MT) language instructional approach. The goal of the…

Computer-based writing is already a norm to a large extent in social communication for any major language around the world. From this perspective, it would be pedagogically sound for students to master the Chinese input system as early as possible. This poses some challenges to students in Singapore, most of which are learning Chinese as a second…

This paper examines how transliteration can be used as a bridge to learning for children who are studying more than one script. The focus is on second and third generation British Bangladeshi children aged 7-11, attending London primary schools and learning to write in Bengali at community-run after-school classes. An action research project…

This article serves as a primer to Mandarin Chinese mainly for chemical practitioners who have no familiarity with the Mandarin Chinese language and who may travel to East Asia during their career or work in collaboration with Chinese-speaking people. Eight vocabulary lists (given in English, written Chinese, and Pinyin romanization) feature…

In this study, we present the analyses stemming from a survey administered to 2149 foreign language learners at Michigan State University. We had three goals. First, we aimed to compile a profile of language learners' technological acumen, access to and ownership of technology, and the current uses of technology across a wide range of languages…

The paper presents preliminary findings of a project which investigated whether learner background, in terms of instruction mode (i.e., school or intensive first-year course at university) and first language (i.e., character based or non-character based), has an impact on the development of writing skills in Japanese as a second language (JSL).…

The influence of different instructional presentations upon meaning and pronunciation acquisition in character learning was examined. High school students learned to identify a series of characters in terms of their associated pinyin and English translation prompts. Acquisition was shown to proceed more rapidly when the Chinese character was…

This article argues that for students of Chinese and Japanese, learning to write Chinese characters ("hanzi/kanji") by hand from memory is an inefficient use of resources. Rather, beginning students should focus on character/word recognition (reading) and electronic writing. Although electronic technologies have diminished the usefulness of…

Five research projects concerning the Romanization of the Hebrew alphabet and its effect on the progress of adult English speakers learning Hebrew as a second language are reviewed. The hypotheses, subjects, procedures, results, conclusions, and validity of each study are summarized. The studies dealt with the Hebrew alphabet, spelling, plural…

This paper reports the findings of a psycholinguistic study of the development of phonological awareness (PA) in Chinese children acquiring their first language and learning a foreign language at the same time. The language situation of these children in relation to PA is of particular interest because Chinese and English have not only different…