LEARNING LANGUAGES BY USING IDIOMS IN MOTHER TONGUE

How is the Mother Tongue Acquired

Implementing Mother-tongue

Hong Kong is a homogeneous community both in terms of race (98% Chinese) and language (over 80% speak Cantonese as their mother tongue). However, the historical and sociolinguistic dynamics there are such that English is the dominant medium of instruction at secondary level and above, while Modern Mandarin, a non-indigenous Chinese (standard) dialect, provides the norms for both the use of Chin...

The Comparative Effect of Using Idioms in Conversation and Paragraph Writing on EFL Learners’ Idiom Learning

This study investigated the comparative effect of teaching idiomatic expressions through practicing them in conversation and paragraph writing on intermediate EFL learners’ idiom learning. The participants were sorted out of a population of 134 intermediate students in Zabansara Language School in Khorramabad based on their scores on a Preliminary English Test (PET) and an idiom test piloted in...

Using arcade games to engage students in the learning of foreign and mother languages

It is imperative to continue thinking about and reinventing education because mobile technologies and the Web are redefining where, when and from whom we learn. Authors from different study fields have recognised the multiple possibilities of video games for language learning and for interdisciplinary use. Education can benefit from the potential of these artefacts if properly integrated into t...

The Acquisition of Clicks by Non-mother-tongue Speakers

It is generally accepted that non-mother-tongue speakers acquiring Xhosa often encounter difficulties with the acquisition of clicks. This paper addresses this issue by focussing on some of the results obtained from 18 Englishand Afrikaans-speaking children aged between 10;0 and 13;0, acquiring Xhosa as a third language in the primary school. The results firstly indicate that non-mother-tongue ...