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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]