The language laboratory has been used in china for foreign language teaching for many years. Unfortunately, not all the language laboratories have been fully utilised and well administered. It is therefore essential for Chinese EFL teachers to become aware of the existing problems and explore avenues for improving the use of the language laboratory. This study aims to identify and to analyse the problems involving materials, methodology and administration in the use of the language laboratory and to discuss possible ways of solving or, at least, reducing these problems. The language laboratory itself is only a mechanical teaching aid. Language laboratory materials, teaching methods and the administration of the language laboratory are fundamental parameters which determine the effective use of the language laboratory. In this study, a review on the different theories and recent developments of language laboratory usage are examined. This is followed by a description of the problem areas in the use of the language laboratory in China. A survey on language laboratory use in Australia is offered as a model for comparison. Finally, implications are put forward and suggestions are made to Chinese EFL teachers in the hope that this may lead to more effective and efficient use of language laboratories in the future.

Pronunciation is an important component of English teaching, particularly in a non-English speaking country like China, where students' exposure to the target language may be only listening to tapes or to the teacher in class, or occasionally watching a film in English, if these audio-visual facilities are available. However, the majority of teachers do not pay enough attention to pronunciation because it always competes for class times with other aspects of language teaching. Moreover, it is not usually tested. As a result, after several years of studying English, some students still cannot speak or read aloud with any degree of accuracy or fluency. Therefore it is essential that in China, the teacher's professional inventory should include acquaintance with basic articulatory phonetics and the phonological system of English, because the teacher is inevitably a pronunciation model for the student. Furthermore, the correction of students' aberrant pronunciation is a continuing task throughout years of teaching at different levels, and one which requires patience and alertness as well as effective techniques. With the rapid development of education in China, the problem of effective teaching of pronunciation has become more prominent. According to the government's plan, the number of students planned to be enrolled in tertiary institutions alone will increase by 42.2 per cent from 1981 to 1985. Foreign language teaching, in theory, starts from the third year of primary school and continues right through the second year of college. The training of teachers at these levels, especially at the primary and secondary levels, is a serious problem. Pronunciation is an inescapable part of language teaching. The questions raised in this paper and the suggestions made may, in part, assist with the training of the large numbers of effective speakers of foreign languages that China needs.

Culture, thought worldview and language have been discussed for a long time in different fields from various perspectives. However, the basis of this study is the view of language as both the product and producer of people just as people are the producer and product of language. Each language requires of those who use it, a particular way of viewing reality. The structure of language containing a particular worldview therefore must influence how people learn and acquire a second language. The purpose of this study is to test this assumption about worldview in adult second language acquisition. The main concern is whether or not the native English speakers' worldview influences their ability to learn Chinese as a second language. The focus of this investigation is the Aspect marker -le, which represents a different way of observing action when compared to Tense used in English. Chinese is a context sensitive language. The way of perceiving action is in terms of Aspect, which is to observe an action within an event from a specific point of view without considering Speech-time. In contrast, English is less context sensitive, and its way of perceiving action is more precise and time-conscious, in terms of Tense. The results of the investigation of a group of native- English-speakers learning Chinese as a second language reveals that the worldview they have in observing action is shaped by their native tongue and interferes with their use of the Chinese Aspect marker -le. / Graduation date: 1998

Thesis (M. A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Increased worldwide mobility has led to a rise in the number of interlingual parents attempting to transmit their native languages to their children. Within the related fields of heritage language acquisition and bilingualism, there is a lack of research focusing on sequential language acquisition. This exploratory longitudinal case study investigates a four-year-old girl’s sequential acquisition of French, her mother’s language, within the context of an expatriate community in Hong Kong in which English, her father’s language, was predominant. Spontaneous speech samples were collected from different learning environments and interviews were conducted to elucidate the impact of the learner’s various experiences on her L2 acquisition. Results indicated a lack of L2 confidence that was perhaps under-estimated by her parents and teachers. The change in maternal input patterns provoked a frequently angry reaction in the learner and resulted in a high proportion of code-switching in her output. Findings indicated tentative support for Muranaka-Vuletich’s (2002) suggestion that child code-switching rates may not always be influenced by the parents and that it may sometimes be the reverse. The bilingual nature of the French community in Hong Kong made it difficult to immerse the learner in truly monolingual L2 environments. However, the combination of the child’s educational and social experiences seem to have contributed to her increased L2 output by the study’s conclusion. The present study may have worrying implications for those parents unable to provide the requisite conditions for L2 acquisition at home and who do not have access to heritage language education or expensive immersion trips. / published_or_final_version / Applied English Studies / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

The principal aim of this study was to investigate what grammar is taught by Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) in both Swedish compulsory school (years 6-9) and upper secondary school (gymnasiet), how it is taught and why. Further questions investigated what research TESOL base their teaching on, what their attitudes are in relation to the relevant curriculum, and what research into grammar teaching (e.g. approaches and methods) has revealed. The study also examined the Swedish National Agency of Education’s views on grammar teaching. Six interviews were conducted with five teachers of English to speakers of other languages working in Swedish schools, and one Czech teacher of English to speakers of other languages working at an international school. The findings were evaluated against research into grammar teaching. Although the Swedish National Agency of Education recommends that school years 6-9 should include an explicit focus on grammar, it does not specify exactly what should be taught. At upper secondary level, teaching grammar is not mentioned at all in the main syllabus. As the only reference to it is buried in the accompanying detailed explanatory notes, teachers tend to interpret the English syllabus differently. Consequently, the syllabus does not encourage equal educational opportunities. Despite the Agency’s vague recommendations, five out of the six teachers in this study do teach grammar and believe it to be a key to language learning. However, the methods used by the five Swedish teachers in this study do not appear to be research informed, and three of them rely heavily on the textbook producers’ choice of grammatical items to focus on. On the other hand, the teacher in the international school clearly uses methods that are research informed. One of the problems appears to be that the teachers in Sweden do not have easy access to current research findings that are comprehensive and non-conflicting, neither during their time at university nor in their working life.

Research on morphological variability in second language (L2) acquisition has focused on the syntactic consequences of variability: that is, whether or not morphological variability entails underlying syntactic deficits. The interrelationship between morphological features in their own right has been largely ignored. This thesis addresses the representation of L2 features by investigating the use of default morphology---the outcome of systematic substitution errors employed by speakers of L2 Spanish. It is hypothesized that underspecified features act as defaults; by assumption, those features that are unmarked are underspecified. / Evidence to support this hypothesis comes from two sets of experiments conducted on intermediate- and advanced-proficiency L2 Spanish subjects (L1 English). The first set of experiments addresses verbal morphology, and consists of a spontaneous production experiment on person, number, tense, and finiteness, and a comprehension task on person and number. The second set of experiments addresses gender and number in nominal morphology, and consists of a spontaneous production experiment on determiners, an elicited production experiment on clitics and adjectives, and a picture-selection task on the comprehension of clitics. Across tasks and across verbal and nominal domains, errors involve the systematic substitution of underspecified morphology. The observation that morphological variability extends to comprehension, and is qualitatively similar to the variability found in production, counters the suggestion that variability is strictly a product of mere performance limitations on production. Finally, the systematicity of substitution errors suggests that the natural classes of features such as gender, number, tense, and person are acquirable in an L2, regardless of whether or not these features have been instantiated in the native language.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Full text release at OhioLINK's ETD Center delayed at author's request

Thesis (M. Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 73-74)

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, November, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 136-139).