If the target of foreign language teaching is to use the language, communicative language teaching (CLT) seems to be an ideal teaching model. The goal of teaching with this method is to use the language as a medium of communication (Adi, 2012).The application of the communicative approach in teaching English as a foreign language, however, is associated with some problems that can cause the met...

Using a corpus-based approach, this paper analyzes figurative language through observing the Chinese five elements (五 行 ) of 金 ‘metal,’ 木 ‘wood,’ 水 ‘water,’ 火 ‘fire’ and 土 ‘earth.’ This work found that there are at least two types of figurative language in Mandarin Chinese – one of which occurs at the morphosyntactic level and the other occurs during the mappings between two domains (between th...

Sequential analysis tests the statistical significance of the sequential relationship between acts. This method of analysis has been widely used in pedagogical scholarship; however, it has not yet been applied to the study of language teaching. This study uses sequential analysis to examine the different instructional methods among nine instructors of Chinese as a Second Language (CSL). The ana...

Chinese has become the world’s strongest language, and that has also set off a learning trend. It is critical to know how to improve teaching methods and strategies to effectively help non-native speakers to overcome the language barrier. With the Internet’s and e-Learning’s popularity, learning technologies have led both learning activities and the environment into a multi-dimensional world. R...

 This research was funded by the National Science Council (NSC) of the Republic of China under Contract No. NSC 98-2631-S415-005. Wu Jiun-Shiung is the primary investigator of the project. Jenny Yi-Chun Kuo and Chung, Shu-Chun are the co-primary investigators. We thank to Mandarin teachers Miao-Chin Chiu and Chen-Hsuan Huang in the Division of Chinese as a Second Language, Language Center, Nat...

Learning about what young children with limited spoken language know about the grammar of their language is extremely challenging. Researchers have traditionally used looking behavior as a measure of language processing and to infer what overt choices children might make. However, these methods are expensive to setup, require specialized training, are time intensive for data analysis and can ha...