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…

Studying musical text effectively reinforces grammar structures and vocabulary taught in class while simultaneously developing cultural literacy, a critical component in second language acquisition. Musical text facilitates a multimodal learning experience as it combines the verbal and aural modes, and is often accompanied by the visual mode. In…

Lexical tone is a linguistic feature which can present difficulties for second language learners wanting to revitalize their heritage language. This is true not only from the standpoint of understanding and pronunciation, but also because tone is often under-documented and resources are limited or too technical to be useful to community members.…

Investigating a tone language involves careful transcription of tone on words and phrases. This is challenging when the phonological categories--the tones or melodies--have not been identified. Effects such as coarticulation, sandhi, and phrase-level prosody appear as obstacles to early elicitation and classification of tone. This article presents…

Chinese characters have been an obstacle preventing the development of Chinese proficiency for learners of Chinese whose native language does not have characters. A substantial literature review identified linguistic, pedagogical, and political factors as causes such difficulties. Tone changes represent different meanings of a word. Compound…

In this paper I argue for a property-driven approach to phonological typology. Rather than seeking to classify or label languages, the central goal of phonological typology is to determine how different languages systematize the phonetic substance available to all languages. The paper focuses on a very murky area in phonological typology,…

Describes the phonological history of modern Cantonese. Part one includes phonotactic conditions, tonal developments, and initial changes. (EKN)

This paper focuses on tonal alternations in the Urhobo noun phrase. Urhobo is an Edoid language spoken extensively in Delta State, Nigeria. The language has two basic tones, high and low, plus a phenomenon of downstep, both automatic and non-automatic. The noun phrases examined include the noun + noun associative construction, the noun + relative…

This article summarizes the development of the Tanacross practical orthography, highlighting the crucial differences between practical and technical orthography used in some linguistic publications. Three stages of Tanacross orthography are exemplified in research from the 1980s. A fourth stage is a hybrid of the second and third stages,…

Illustrates how the separate economic and political development and the ensuing lack of contact between Hong Kong and Guangzhou over the last 50 years have resulted in quantifiable tonal differences in the Cantonese spoken in these two cities. (16 references) (Author/CK)

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)

Using Yoruba as a case study, this article demonstrates the fact that the languages of Africa and the cultures of its peoples are inseparable. Therefore, the study advocates that appropriate aspects of these cultures should form an integral part of African language teaching. This article discusses specifically how language teachers can transmit…

Presents a pair of innovations, originally developed and used for teaching Mandarin, that are now being applied to the teaching of Cantonese, Vietnamese, and Thai, involving a double system of representation to encourage easier pronunciation and long-term learning; and a special sequencing for presenting the tones. (36 references) (CB)

Examines topical issues in the study of African American, Asian American, Native American, and Hispanic American cultures. Horizontally, the article discusses inter- and intra-cultural conflicts, use of two-toned language, and the fight for social justification as portrayed in American ethnic literatures. Vertically, the connection of these ethnic…