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This case study examines the barriers to technology integration into teaching Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) in Australian secondary schools. Previous research on technology integration predominantly focused on higher education and English as a second language. This study extends the field by exploring barriers in secondary schools and targeting Chinse instruction. It identified three layers of barriers: The tool (technology), The user (teacher and student), and The tool supporter (school). This study highlights the students as technology users and as significant factors behind the teacher's technology consideration. Among the identified barriers, most notably were limited and blocked access to technology, a lack of time for class preparation and technology learning, a lack of technology knowledge, a lack of professional development, and students' distracting behaviours. Suggestions were made accordingly to improve tech-integrated Chinese teaching in Australian secondary schools.

This study investigates the links between the second-generation Chinese Australians' heritage language proficiency and perceptions of Chinese identity. Thirty 10--11-year-old children of Chinese immigrants took a Chinese proficiency test and participated in semi-structured interviews. The test revealed a wide range of performance levels in all the four skills except listening among the Chinese-Australian children. It was found that the high-achieving participants expressed aspirations for attaining high levels of Chinese literacy and identified themselves as being half Australian half Chinese. In contrast, the low-achieving participants showed an inclination to communicate in English only and perceived themselves as mainly Australian. The study suggests, to increase chances of heritage language maintenance and cultivation of a bicultural identity, children need substantial support and access to the various resources, avenues, and opportunities to learn Chinese both at family and community levels. This study is significant in providing empirical evidence for the debate of language and identity while awakening the Chinese diaspora to heritage language maintenance.

The sediments of closed-basin lakes on the margin of the East Asian summer monsoon (EASM) are valuable archives of past changes in hydroclimate and dust activity and thus potentially can help us to understand future climate changes. We present high-resolution, well-dated records of the grain size and carbonate mineralogy from Lake Bayanchagan, northern China, spanning the last 11.5 ka. Grain-size endmember (EM) analysis distinguished four EMs, each linked to different sediment transport processes. EM1 (0.4–0.6 μm) and EM3 (14–102 μm) reflect the strength of regional dust activity, whereas EM2 (1.3–31 μm) represents variations in local hydrodynamic conditions related to lake-level changes and EM4 (68–500 μm) is associated with local dust activity. Our results show that a high lake level and weakened dust activity occurred during 10–5.8 ka, as indicated by increased EM2 and decreased EM3, respectively. After 5.8 ka, EM2 decreased as the three other EMs increased, and dolomite appeared in the sediments while calcite decreased—indicating both a decline in lake level and strengthened dust activity. The fluctuations in lake level and dust activity are in good agreement with precipitation variations reconstructed from other records, which are in turn correlated to movement of the EASM rainfall belt, in response to temperature changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the task-based language teaching (TBLT) framework, this study investigated learners' perceptions of a WeChat task being integrated into a Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) curriculum. The WeChat task linked up learners of Chinese from an Australian university with native speakers of Chinese as international students on the same campus. The learner-native speaker pair were required to complete weekly assigned communication sub-tasks through WeChat for ten weeks in semester 2 of 2017. Both a questionnaire survey and an interview were conducted for data collection. Findings show that participants were very positive with the WeChat task. They expressed their enjoyment and satisfaction in completing the question-asking and answering interactions with native speakers through WeChat. As an important component of the tertiary CFL curriculum, the WeChat task was a great learning task to supplement classroom learning. It is also an ideal learning task that makes use of the native speaker resources and mobile assisted language learning technology to achieve the best learning outcome in teaching Chinese as a foreign language.

Affordance refers to the opportunity available to a learning activity. Taking affordance as a theoretical and analytical construct, this exploratory study investigates learners' attitudes and the opportunities WeChat may provide for Chinese cultural knowledge (CCK) learning. The aim is to find out the potential new affordances and compare learners with different language levels. 24 participants were paired with native Chinese speakers and required to complete three-stage activities with the integration of WeChat. This study adopted a mix-method approach. Data were collected through questionnaires, two rounds of semi-structured interviews, chat logs, and WeChat moments. It is found that most learners were positive toward the activities and WeChat provided learners with opportunities for interaction and collaboration, for resource sharing, for knowledge internalization and construction, and for sustainable learning and friendship maintaining. The affordance of knowledge internalization and construction was mentioned with the highest frequency in the interview. The findings that distinguish this study from previous ones are: (1) the affordance for sustainable learning, and (2) differences between high-level (HL) and low-level (LL) learners. In comparison, the activities won more supports from HL learners, and HL learners' frequency in leveraging the affordance for resource sharing and sustainable learning was also higher. Pedagogical implications and research recommendations were provided respectively in discussion and conclusion parts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To generate an image‐driven biomarker (Rad_score) to predict tumor‐infiltrating regulatory T lymphocytes (Treg) in breast cancer (BC). Methods: Overall, 928 BC patients were enrolled from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) for survival analysis; MRI (n = 71 and n = 30 in the training and validation sets, respectively) from the Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) were retrieved and subjected to repeat least absolute shrinkage and selection operator for feature reduction. The radiomic scores (rad_score) for Treg infiltration estimation were calculated via support vector machine (SVM) and logistic regression (LR) algorithms, and validated on the remaining patients. Results: Landmark analysis indicated Treg infiltration was a risk factor for BC patients in the first 5 years and after 10 years of diagnosis (p = 0.007 and 0.018, respectively). Altogether, 108 radiomic features were extracted from MRI images, 4 of which remained for model construction. Areas under curves (AUCs) of the SVM model were 0.744 (95% CI 0.622–0.867) and 0.733 (95% CI 0.535–0.931) for training and validation sets, respectively, while for the LR model, AUCs were 0.771 (95% CI 0.657–0.885) and 0.724 (95% CI 0.522–0.926). The calibration curves indicated good agreement between prediction and true value (p > 0.05), and DCA shows the high clinical utility of the radiomic model. Rad_score was significantly correlated with immune inhibitory genes like CTLA4 and PDCD1. Conclusions: High Treg infiltration is a risk factor for patients with BC. The Rad_score formulated on radiomic features is a novel tool to predict Treg abundance in the tumor microenvironment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates measures for second language (L2) writing development. A T-unit, which has been found the most satisfactory unit of analysis for measuring L2 development in English, is extended to measure L2 Chinese writing development through a cross-sectional design in this study. Data were collected from three L2 Chinese learner groups (n = 116) at different proficiency levels determined by institutional status, namely year of study and a native control group (n = 66). A T-unit in Chinese is firstly defined and then solutions for questions of practicality faced in extending T-unit analysis to Chinese are provided. In order to confirm the reliability of T-unit length as a measure for Chinese, T-unit analysis is applied to L1 Chinese before it is used to measure L2 Chinese development. With T-unit length being established as a reliable measure in L1 Chinese, three specific T-unit measures, namely T-unit length, error-free T-unit length, and percentage of error-free T-units, are extended to measure L2 Chinese writing development. Percentage of error-free T-units is found to be the only measure that discriminates between all levels of this learner cohort. Significance of the findings and relevance to measurements of L2 writing development in general are discussed.

This study examines the effect of recognition-based retrieval practice on vocabulary learning in a university Chinese class. Students (N=26) were given practice retrieving new vocabulary (single or two-character words) in a series of simple form recognition tests administered over four weeks. The test sets consisted of target vocabulary that appeared in the previous week's lesson and distracter items drawn from upcoming vocabulary. Tests were group-administered via PowerPoint and students used a checklist response to indicate whether a given item had appeared in the previous week's material. Responses relied on episodic knowledge of previous exposure and required no processing of semantic information. Students were able to reliably identify the target items in the retrieval task with performance on these items being found superior to that for supplementary list control words on midterm and final vocabulary tests. The findings indicate that a focus on word forms can have a measurable effect on vocabulary learning in the classroom and underscores the efficacy of retrieval-based testing (the testing effect, Barcroft, 2007; Roediger & Karpicke, 2006) in facilitating vocabulary learning. The implications for recognition-based retrieval practice in vocabulary instruction in the Chinese classroom are discussed.

Technological advances have brought about the ever-increasing utilisation of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) media in the learning of a second language (L2). Computer-mediated communication, for example, provides a practical means for extending the learning of spoken language, a challenging process in tonal languages such as Chinese, beyond the realms of the classroom. In order to effectively improve spoken language competency, however, CALL applications must also reproduce the social interaction that lies at the heart of language learning and language use. This study draws on data obtained from the utilisation of CALL in the learning of L2 Chinese to explore whether this medium can be used to extend opportunities for rapport-building in language teaching beyond the face-to-face interaction of the classroom. Rapport's importance lies in its potential to enhance learning, motivate learners, and reduce learner anxiety. To date, CALL's potential in relation to this facet of social interaction remains a neglected area of research. The results of this exploratory study suggest that CALL may help foster learner-teacher rapport and that scaffolding, such as strategically composing rapport-fostering questions in sound-files, is conducive to this outcome. The study provides an instruction model for this application of CALL. (Contains 4 tables and 2 notes.)

Reviews Archer's and Thorp's ideas about the most frequently encountered culture bumps or "confused encounters," and offers alternative ways of perceiving and handling them. Also stresses that the fundamental values of a nation should be considered in dealing with these cultural variations and suggests six principles for perceiving and handling them. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the inseparability of culture and language, presents three new metaphors relating to culture and language, and explores cultural content in specific language items through a survey of word associations. The survey was designed for native Chinese speakers in Chinese as well as for native English speakers in English. (Author/VWL)

The text matching is a basic task of NLP and is important for tasks such as text retrieval, question answering, and so forth. The development of pre‐trained language models has promoted the progress of text matching tasks. However, due to the natural particularity of Chinese characters and expressions, the Chinese text matching tasks still have problems such as word segmentation difficulty, serious semantic loss, and model instability. In this paper, we propose the DAINet model, which includes DMM, AA and IO modules. We use the Dynamic Multi‐Mask module (DMM) to enhance the completeness of word segmentation. Then we use the Augmented Adversarial module (AA) to further extraction of semantic information. Finally, we use the Integrated Output module (IO) for a more stable output. We conducted experiments on LCQMC, BQ and Xiaobu datasets and compared the results with seven strong baseline models. The results showed that DAINet model made great improvement, including improving ACC value of BQ dataset to 86.0%+0.8%, AUC value to 93.9%+0.8%, ACC value of LCQMC dataset to 88.7%+1.1% and AUC value to 97.2%+1.0%. The ACC value of Xiaobu dataset was improved to 83.2%+1.3% and the AUC value was improved to 91.7%+2.2%. Further ablation experiment results show that the proposed DMM, AA and IO modules have good adaptability and improvement over existing models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]