This editorial critically evaluated the recent study by AlMousa et al,which examined the impact of the Arabic version of the American Academy of Or-thopedic Surgeons Foot and Ankle Outcomes Questionnaire(AAOS-FAOQ)on ...This editorial critically evaluated the recent study by AlMousa et al,which examined the impact of the Arabic version of the American Academy of Or-thopedic Surgeons Foot and Ankle Outcomes Questionnaire(AAOS-FAOQ)on postoperative quality of life and recovery in Arabic-speaking patients with traumatic foot and ankle injuries.In the context of systemic linguistic exclusion in orthopedic research—where English-language journals dominated most publi-cations and non-English-speaking populations faced dual barriers of trial under-representation and semantic distortions(e.g.,mistranslations of terms like"joint instability"in Arabic)—AlMousa et al's work highlighted the transformative po-tential of culturally adapted methodologies.Their rigorous four-stage adaptation framework validated the Arabic AAOS-FAOQ as a reliable tool,enhancing ecological validity and reducing bias in patient-reported outcomes.However,limitations such as regional specificity(Gulf-centric sampling)and short follow-up periods(4 months)underscored broader challenges in non-English research:Redundant studies,prolonged hospital stays for limited English proficiency patients,and underrepresentation of certain ethnic groups in trials.To dismantle linguistic hegemony,we proposed semantic reconstruction(e.g.,integrating culturally specific indicators like"prayer posture"),dialect-aware neural tran-slation,and World Health Organization led terminology standardization.In line with these proposed solutions,AlMousa et al’s study exemplified how language-sensitive adaptations could bridge equity gaps,while future efforts would need to balance cultural specificity with cross-study comparability through AI-driven multilingual databases and policy mandates for cultural adaptation roadmaps.展开更多
With the rapid growth of the Internet and social media, information is widely disseminated in multimodal forms, such as text and images, where discriminatory content can manifest in various ways. Discrimination detect...With the rapid growth of the Internet and social media, information is widely disseminated in multimodal forms, such as text and images, where discriminatory content can manifest in various ways. Discrimination detection techniques for multilingual and multimodal data can identify potential discriminatory behavior and help foster a more equitable and inclusive cyberspace. However, existing methods often struggle in complex contexts and multilingual environments. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an innovative detection method, using image and multilingual text encoders to separately extract features from different modalities. It continuously updates a historical feature memory bank, aggregates the Top-K most similar samples, and utilizes a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) to integrate current and historical features, generating enhanced feature representations with stronger semantic expressiveness to improve the model’s ability to capture discriminatory signals. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits superior discriminative power and detection accuracy in multilingual and multimodal contexts, offering a reliable and effective solution for identifying discriminatory content.展开更多
Teachers’ beliefs toward multilingual awareness in target language learning play a significant role in shaping learners’ attitudes to language awareness, affect learners’ linguistic behavior and teachers’ teaching...Teachers’ beliefs toward multilingual awareness in target language learning play a significant role in shaping learners’ attitudes to language awareness, affect learners’ linguistic behavior and teachers’ teaching practice. Therefore, the present study was aimed to explore English teachers’ beliefs about Inner Mongolian university students’ multilingual awareness in L3 learning and their teaching practice in Chinese EFL context. One hundred English teachers from six universities in Inner Mongolia, China, participated in this investigation. The data was collected through a questionnaire and teacher interviews. The results indicate that English teachers hold positive attitudes to multilingual awareness in general;however, there are belief differences between Mongolian and Han teachers;there exist discrepancies between English teachers’ beliefs about multilingual awareness and their teaching practice, and social-cultural environment, family language policy,teacher identity, learning experience, teaching materials, and, more importantly, teachers’ lack of awareness of fostering learners’ multilingual awareness lead to the discrepancies. The present research highlights the necessity of raising teacher awareness of cultivating multilingual awareness in future teacher development and emphasizes the significance of exploring the potential cognitive advantages of multilingualism in promoting L3 learning and developing English learners’ multilingual competence in the EFL context in China.展开更多
In the age of the internet,social media are connecting us all at the tip of our fingers.People are linkedthrough different social media.The social network,Twitter,allows people to tweet their thoughts on any particula...In the age of the internet,social media are connecting us all at the tip of our fingers.People are linkedthrough different social media.The social network,Twitter,allows people to tweet their thoughts on any particular event or a specific political body which provides us with a diverse range of political insights.This paper serves the purpose of text processing of a multilingual dataset including Urdu,English,and Roman Urdu.Explore machine learning solutions for sentiment analysis and train models,collect the data on government from Twitter,apply sentiment analysis,and provide a python library that classifies text sentiment.Training data contained tweets in three languages:English:200k,Urdu:200k and Roman Urdu:11k.Five different classification models are applied to determine sentiments,and eventually,the use of ensemble technique to move forward with the acquired results is explored.The Logistic Regression model performed best with an accuracy of 75%,followed by the Linear Support Vector classifier and Stochastic Gradient Descent model,both having 74%accuracy.Lastly,Multinomial Naïve Bayes and Complement Naïve Bayes models both achieved 73%accuracy.展开更多
In the book review,the author introduced the latest theoretical and practical endeavors by Isreali scholars to tackle challenges posed by multilingualism.Michal Tannenbaum and Elena Shohamy conducted a comprehensive e...In the book review,the author introduced the latest theoretical and practical endeavors by Isreali scholars to tackle challenges posed by multilingualism.Michal Tannenbaum and Elena Shohamy conducted a comprehensive examination of the Isreali social and educational context,setting the stage for their proposal of a new multilingual policy.The new multilingual education policy has been formulated on the basis of extensive domestic and overseas research and empirical investigation,it is expected to be offer some insights into promoting multilingualism and social justice in both Isreal and the world.展开更多
Taxonomy denotes the hierarchical structure of a knowledge organization system. It has important applications in knowledge navigation, semantic annotation and semantic search. It is a useful instrument to study the mu...Taxonomy denotes the hierarchical structure of a knowledge organization system. It has important applications in knowledge navigation, semantic annotation and semantic search. It is a useful instrument to study the multilingual taxonomy generated automatically under the dynamic information environment in which massive amounts of information are processed and found. Multilingual taxonomy is the core component of the multilingual thesaurus or ontology. This paper presents two methods of bilingual generated taxonomy: Cross-language terminology clustering and mixed-language based terminology clustering. According to our experimental results of terminology clustering related to four specific subject domains, we found that if the parallel corpus is used to cluster multilingual terminologies, the method of using mixed-language based terminology clustering outperforms that of using the cross-language terminology clustering.展开更多
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is vital for very low-resource languages for mitigating the extinction trouble. Chaha is one of the low-resource languages, which suffers from the problem of resource insufficiency a...Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is vital for very low-resource languages for mitigating the extinction trouble. Chaha is one of the low-resource languages, which suffers from the problem of resource insufficiency and some of its phonological, morphological, and orthographic features challenge the development and initiatives in the area of ASR. By considering these challenges, this study is the first endeavor, which analyzed the characteristics of the language, prepared speech corpus, and developed different ASR systems. A small 3-hour read speech corpus was prepared and transcribed. Different basic and rounded phone unit-based speech recognizers were explored using multilingual deep neural network (DNN) modeling methods. The experimental results demonstrated that all the basic phone and rounded phone unit-based multilingual models outperformed the corresponding unilingual models with the relative performance improvements of 5.47% to 19.87% and 5.74% to 16.77%, respectively. The rounded phone unit-based multilingual models outperformed the equivalent basic phone unit-based models with relative performance improvements of 0.95% to 4.98%. Overall, we discovered that multilingual DNN modeling methods are profoundly effective to develop Chaha speech recognizers. Both the basic and rounded phone acoustic units are convenient to build Chaha ASR system. However, the rounded phone unit-based models are superior in performance and faster in recognition speed over the corresponding basic phone unit-based models. Hence, the rounded phone units are the most suitable acoustic units to develop Chaha ASR systems.展开更多
Inspired by a Chinese notion of "无为而治", this paper tends to stresses the nature of language learners, who always bring in their multilingual competence in their language learning process. Based on a thor...Inspired by a Chinese notion of "无为而治", this paper tends to stresses the nature of language learners, who always bring in their multilingual competence in their language learning process. Based on a thorough presentation about the nature of language learners, this paper also provides constructive teaching implications for future actual teaching practices.展开更多
The China-US Million Book Digital Library Project （Million Book Project） is an intemational cooperation program between China and the US. However, one million digitized books are considered not to be the ultimate go...The China-US Million Book Digital Library Project （Million Book Project） is an intemational cooperation program between China and the US. However, one million digitized books are considered not to be the ultimate goal of the project, but a first step towards universal access to human knowledge. In particular, there are four challenges about the new way to analyze, process, operate, visualize and interact with digital media resource in this library. To tackle these challenges, North China Centre of Million Book Project （in Chinese Academy of Sciences） has initiated several innovative research projects in areas such as multimedia content analysis and retrieval, bilingual services, multimodal information presentation, and knowledge-based organization and services. In this keynote speech, we simply review our work in these areas, and argue that by technological cooperation with these innovation research topics, the project will develop a top-level digital library platform for the million book library.展开更多
In view of the study of finance and economics information, we research on the real-time financial news posted on the authority sites in the world's major advanced economies. Analyzing the massive financial news of...In view of the study of finance and economics information, we research on the real-time financial news posted on the authority sites in the world's major advanced economies. Analyzing the massive financial news of different information sources and language origins, we come up with a basic theory model and its algorithm on financial news, which is capable of intelligent collection, quick access, deduplication, correction and integration with financial news' backgrounds. Furthermore, we can find out connections between financial news and readers' interest. So we can achieve a real-time and on-demand financial news feed, as well as provide a theoretical basis and verification of the scientific problems on real-time processing of massive information. Finally, the simulation experiment shows that the multilingual financial news matching technology can give more help to distinguish the similar financial news in different languages than the traditional method.展开更多
In this paper, we present a cloud service model of multilingual home-school communications （MHSC） with the Drupal framework to provide a friendly learning environment for the students from transnational marriages. T...In this paper, we present a cloud service model of multilingual home-school communications （MHSC） with the Drupal framework to provide a friendly learning environment for the students from transnational marriages. The transnational marriage is a phenomenon with ever-increasing in Taiwan and around the world. For a student who has a transnational foreign mother, home-school communication is often an obstacle because the foreign mother has language difficulty understanding the delivered messages in the communication book from teachers. In order to improve parent-teacher communications for the transnational families, we designed and constructed the cloud service platform with online multilingual communications and translation service functions, such that teachers can prepare different sheets of multilingual messages for home-school communication books and foreign mothers can read the messages from the teachers in their native languages through the web interface.展开更多
This article describes a multiyear initiative of a multilingual multicultural international school that has come to adopt and internalize character development as part of its identity.That is,character education has b...This article describes a multiyear initiative of a multilingual multicultural international school that has come to adopt and internalize character development as part of its identity.That is,character education has been treated as a central tenet and core value that permeates the school and binds the community.It has not been regarded as a supplemental or enhancement project,but rather integral to the general educational program.Built from a principled framework with sound theoretical backing,the infusion of character education at this international school has resulted in the crafting of new standards and the introduction of teacher and student self-assessment tools.In that vein,in this article,we share how the school has come to embrace character development and has forged personalized ways for stakeholders,including teachers and multilingual learners,to engage in improving teaching and learning.展开更多
Recent research has emphasized that attitude is key to language learners’learning outcomes.More specifically,language learners’feelings about languages and language learning may affect their study behavior and willi...Recent research has emphasized that attitude is key to language learners’learning outcomes.More specifically,language learners’feelings about languages and language learning may affect their study behavior and willingness to engage with a second or foreign language.Few studies on language attitudes have been conducted with ethnic minority groups in China.As such,influencing factors(e.g.,gender,language proficiency)have not gained sufficient attention.The present study aims to explore language attitudes,especially towards multilingualism,among members of the Li minority group in Hainan,China.First,we conceptualized and validated a questionnaire on attitudes towards multilingualism.Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis verified the survey’s validity.Then,we examined how selected sociodemographic variables(e.g.,gender and language proficiency)influenced students’attitudes towards multilingualism.Hierarchical regression was performed to ascertain the contribution of each predictor variable to learners’attitudes towards multilingualism.Results revealed no significant relationship between gender and language attitudes but found a significant impact of students’language proficiency level on their attitudes towards multilingualism.Implications for minority students’multilingual learning were discussed based on the findings.展开更多
This paper reports on seven years of collaborative research with the Department for Education and Child Development. The longitudinal study examines the impact ofa multilingual literacy approach as it has been applied...This paper reports on seven years of collaborative research with the Department for Education and Child Development. The longitudinal study examines the impact ofa multilingual literacy approach as it has been applied in the teaching of French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish across 12 different schools in South Australia. The move to introduce the study of additional languages in Australian primary schools has yet to establish wide-ranging and on-going student engagement and often fails to progress students beyond simple pragmatic language use. It is argued that a new approach integrates languages in daily classroom literacy practices can redress this situation： a multilingual literacy approach. The theoretical framework that drives this approach draws from the notions of universality and transfer that are established in the literature. A critical realist paradigm provided a framework for integrating research methods： employing contingency theory and pragmatic methods of philosophy also ensured that values and hermeneutics were not sidelined in the explanation of the study＇s acts and outcomes. This longitudinal study demonstrates that when the aforementioned theoretical notions bridge the research-practice divide and are adopted into daily classroom teaching and learning activities, there is a qualitative and quantitative improvement in students＇ literacy learning展开更多
This paper seeks to do three things： （1） examine the linguistic situation of Cameroon; （2） identify the language（s） used in education; and （3） discuss whether in the light of the social linguistic evidence, t...This paper seeks to do three things： （1） examine the linguistic situation of Cameroon; （2） identify the language（s） used in education; and （3） discuss whether in the light of the social linguistic evidence, the current choice of language for education （English） is well motivated. The methodology employed is a socio-lin some randomly selected urban centers in Cameroon for example, Buea, Bamenda, Kumba, guistic survey of etc.. The results suggest among other things： （1） that Cameroon is a highly multilingual country with over 280 home languages and （2） that while English is the language for Anglophone education, Pidgin English is actually the predominant language and the first language for most Anglophones. Based on these findings, the author proposes Pidgin English as the choice language for early education in Anglophone Cameroon （the southwest and northwest regions）. Pidgin English is the only language which expresses Cameroonian reality. It is spoken by more than 70% of the population. It is the only language that is not associated with a particular tribe, religion, or with a specific colonial government.展开更多
文摘This editorial critically evaluated the recent study by AlMousa et al,which examined the impact of the Arabic version of the American Academy of Or-thopedic Surgeons Foot and Ankle Outcomes Questionnaire(AAOS-FAOQ)on postoperative quality of life and recovery in Arabic-speaking patients with traumatic foot and ankle injuries.In the context of systemic linguistic exclusion in orthopedic research—where English-language journals dominated most publi-cations and non-English-speaking populations faced dual barriers of trial under-representation and semantic distortions(e.g.,mistranslations of terms like"joint instability"in Arabic)—AlMousa et al's work highlighted the transformative po-tential of culturally adapted methodologies.Their rigorous four-stage adaptation framework validated the Arabic AAOS-FAOQ as a reliable tool,enhancing ecological validity and reducing bias in patient-reported outcomes.However,limitations such as regional specificity(Gulf-centric sampling)and short follow-up periods(4 months)underscored broader challenges in non-English research:Redundant studies,prolonged hospital stays for limited English proficiency patients,and underrepresentation of certain ethnic groups in trials.To dismantle linguistic hegemony,we proposed semantic reconstruction(e.g.,integrating culturally specific indicators like"prayer posture"),dialect-aware neural tran-slation,and World Health Organization led terminology standardization.In line with these proposed solutions,AlMousa et al’s study exemplified how language-sensitive adaptations could bridge equity gaps,while future efforts would need to balance cultural specificity with cross-study comparability through AI-driven multilingual databases and policy mandates for cultural adaptation roadmaps.
基金funded by the Open Foundation of Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Security,Ministry of Education[KLCS20240210].
文摘With the rapid growth of the Internet and social media, information is widely disseminated in multimodal forms, such as text and images, where discriminatory content can manifest in various ways. Discrimination detection techniques for multilingual and multimodal data can identify potential discriminatory behavior and help foster a more equitable and inclusive cyberspace. However, existing methods often struggle in complex contexts and multilingual environments. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an innovative detection method, using image and multilingual text encoders to separately extract features from different modalities. It continuously updates a historical feature memory bank, aggregates the Top-K most similar samples, and utilizes a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) to integrate current and historical features, generating enhanced feature representations with stronger semantic expressiveness to improve the model’s ability to capture discriminatory signals. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits superior discriminative power and detection accuracy in multilingual and multimodal contexts, offering a reliable and effective solution for identifying discriminatory content.
文摘Teachers’ beliefs toward multilingual awareness in target language learning play a significant role in shaping learners’ attitudes to language awareness, affect learners’ linguistic behavior and teachers’ teaching practice. Therefore, the present study was aimed to explore English teachers’ beliefs about Inner Mongolian university students’ multilingual awareness in L3 learning and their teaching practice in Chinese EFL context. One hundred English teachers from six universities in Inner Mongolia, China, participated in this investigation. The data was collected through a questionnaire and teacher interviews. The results indicate that English teachers hold positive attitudes to multilingual awareness in general;however, there are belief differences between Mongolian and Han teachers;there exist discrepancies between English teachers’ beliefs about multilingual awareness and their teaching practice, and social-cultural environment, family language policy,teacher identity, learning experience, teaching materials, and, more importantly, teachers’ lack of awareness of fostering learners’ multilingual awareness lead to the discrepancies. The present research highlights the necessity of raising teacher awareness of cultivating multilingual awareness in future teacher development and emphasizes the significance of exploring the potential cognitive advantages of multilingualism in promoting L3 learning and developing English learners’ multilingual competence in the EFL context in China.
文摘In the age of the internet,social media are connecting us all at the tip of our fingers.People are linkedthrough different social media.The social network,Twitter,allows people to tweet their thoughts on any particular event or a specific political body which provides us with a diverse range of political insights.This paper serves the purpose of text processing of a multilingual dataset including Urdu,English,and Roman Urdu.Explore machine learning solutions for sentiment analysis and train models,collect the data on government from Twitter,apply sentiment analysis,and provide a python library that classifies text sentiment.Training data contained tweets in three languages:English:200k,Urdu:200k and Roman Urdu:11k.Five different classification models are applied to determine sentiments,and eventually,the use of ensemble technique to move forward with the acquired results is explored.The Logistic Regression model performed best with an accuracy of 75%,followed by the Linear Support Vector classifier and Stochastic Gradient Descent model,both having 74%accuracy.Lastly,Multinomial Naïve Bayes and Complement Naïve Bayes models both achieved 73%accuracy.
基金This paper is supported by The 2022 Foreign Language Teaching Material Study[Grant Number 2022SH0017]and the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology[CFTD221005].
文摘In the book review,the author introduced the latest theoretical and practical endeavors by Isreali scholars to tackle challenges posed by multilingualism.Michal Tannenbaum and Elena Shohamy conducted a comprehensive examination of the Isreali social and educational context,setting the stage for their proposal of a new multilingual policy.The new multilingual education policy has been formulated on the basis of extensive domestic and overseas research and empirical investigation,it is expected to be offer some insights into promoting multilingualism and social justice in both Isreal and the world.
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant No.:70903032)the Foundation for Humanities and Social Science of the Chinese Ministry of Education(Grant No.:08JC870007)
文摘Taxonomy denotes the hierarchical structure of a knowledge organization system. It has important applications in knowledge navigation, semantic annotation and semantic search. It is a useful instrument to study the multilingual taxonomy generated automatically under the dynamic information environment in which massive amounts of information are processed and found. Multilingual taxonomy is the core component of the multilingual thesaurus or ontology. This paper presents two methods of bilingual generated taxonomy: Cross-language terminology clustering and mixed-language based terminology clustering. According to our experimental results of terminology clustering related to four specific subject domains, we found that if the parallel corpus is used to cluster multilingual terminologies, the method of using mixed-language based terminology clustering outperforms that of using the cross-language terminology clustering.
文摘Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is vital for very low-resource languages for mitigating the extinction trouble. Chaha is one of the low-resource languages, which suffers from the problem of resource insufficiency and some of its phonological, morphological, and orthographic features challenge the development and initiatives in the area of ASR. By considering these challenges, this study is the first endeavor, which analyzed the characteristics of the language, prepared speech corpus, and developed different ASR systems. A small 3-hour read speech corpus was prepared and transcribed. Different basic and rounded phone unit-based speech recognizers were explored using multilingual deep neural network (DNN) modeling methods. The experimental results demonstrated that all the basic phone and rounded phone unit-based multilingual models outperformed the corresponding unilingual models with the relative performance improvements of 5.47% to 19.87% and 5.74% to 16.77%, respectively. The rounded phone unit-based multilingual models outperformed the equivalent basic phone unit-based models with relative performance improvements of 0.95% to 4.98%. Overall, we discovered that multilingual DNN modeling methods are profoundly effective to develop Chaha speech recognizers. Both the basic and rounded phone acoustic units are convenient to build Chaha ASR system. However, the rounded phone unit-based models are superior in performance and faster in recognition speed over the corresponding basic phone unit-based models. Hence, the rounded phone units are the most suitable acoustic units to develop Chaha ASR systems.
文摘Inspired by a Chinese notion of "无为而治", this paper tends to stresses the nature of language learners, who always bring in their multilingual competence in their language learning process. Based on a thorough presentation about the nature of language learners, this paper also provides constructive teaching implications for future actual teaching practices.
文摘The China-US Million Book Digital Library Project （Million Book Project） is an intemational cooperation program between China and the US. However, one million digitized books are considered not to be the ultimate goal of the project, but a first step towards universal access to human knowledge. In particular, there are four challenges about the new way to analyze, process, operate, visualize and interact with digital media resource in this library. To tackle these challenges, North China Centre of Million Book Project （in Chinese Academy of Sciences） has initiated several innovative research projects in areas such as multimedia content analysis and retrieval, bilingual services, multimodal information presentation, and knowledge-based organization and services. In this keynote speech, we simply review our work in these areas, and argue that by technological cooperation with these innovation research topics, the project will develop a top-level digital library platform for the million book library.
基金the National Social Science Foundation of China(Nos.15CTQ028 and 14@ZH036)the Social Science Foundation of Beijing(No.15SHA002)the Young Faculty Research Fund of Beijing Foreign Studies University(No.2015JT008)
文摘In view of the study of finance and economics information, we research on the real-time financial news posted on the authority sites in the world's major advanced economies. Analyzing the massive financial news of different information sources and language origins, we come up with a basic theory model and its algorithm on financial news, which is capable of intelligent collection, quick access, deduplication, correction and integration with financial news' backgrounds. Furthermore, we can find out connections between financial news and readers' interest. So we can achieve a real-time and on-demand financial news feed, as well as provide a theoretical basis and verification of the scientific problems on real-time processing of massive information. Finally, the simulation experiment shows that the multilingual financial news matching technology can give more help to distinguish the similar financial news in different languages than the traditional method.
基金supports from the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Asia University
文摘In this paper, we present a cloud service model of multilingual home-school communications （MHSC） with the Drupal framework to provide a friendly learning environment for the students from transnational marriages. The transnational marriage is a phenomenon with ever-increasing in Taiwan and around the world. For a student who has a transnational foreign mother, home-school communication is often an obstacle because the foreign mother has language difficulty understanding the delivered messages in the communication book from teachers. In order to improve parent-teacher communications for the transnational families, we designed and constructed the cloud service platform with online multilingual communications and translation service functions, such that teachers can prepare different sheets of multilingual messages for home-school communication books and foreign mothers can read the messages from the teachers in their native languages through the web interface.
文摘This article describes a multiyear initiative of a multilingual multicultural international school that has come to adopt and internalize character development as part of its identity.That is,character education has been treated as a central tenet and core value that permeates the school and binds the community.It has not been regarded as a supplemental or enhancement project,but rather integral to the general educational program.Built from a principled framework with sound theoretical backing,the infusion of character education at this international school has resulted in the crafting of new standards and the introduction of teacher and student self-assessment tools.In that vein,in this article,we share how the school has come to embrace character development and has forged personalized ways for stakeholders,including teachers and multilingual learners,to engage in improving teaching and learning.
文摘Recent research has emphasized that attitude is key to language learners’learning outcomes.More specifically,language learners’feelings about languages and language learning may affect their study behavior and willingness to engage with a second or foreign language.Few studies on language attitudes have been conducted with ethnic minority groups in China.As such,influencing factors(e.g.,gender,language proficiency)have not gained sufficient attention.The present study aims to explore language attitudes,especially towards multilingualism,among members of the Li minority group in Hainan,China.First,we conceptualized and validated a questionnaire on attitudes towards multilingualism.Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis verified the survey’s validity.Then,we examined how selected sociodemographic variables(e.g.,gender and language proficiency)influenced students’attitudes towards multilingualism.Hierarchical regression was performed to ascertain the contribution of each predictor variable to learners’attitudes towards multilingualism.Results revealed no significant relationship between gender and language attitudes but found a significant impact of students’language proficiency level on their attitudes towards multilingualism.Implications for minority students’multilingual learning were discussed based on the findings.
文摘This paper reports on seven years of collaborative research with the Department for Education and Child Development. The longitudinal study examines the impact ofa multilingual literacy approach as it has been applied in the teaching of French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish across 12 different schools in South Australia. The move to introduce the study of additional languages in Australian primary schools has yet to establish wide-ranging and on-going student engagement and often fails to progress students beyond simple pragmatic language use. It is argued that a new approach integrates languages in daily classroom literacy practices can redress this situation： a multilingual literacy approach. The theoretical framework that drives this approach draws from the notions of universality and transfer that are established in the literature. A critical realist paradigm provided a framework for integrating research methods： employing contingency theory and pragmatic methods of philosophy also ensured that values and hermeneutics were not sidelined in the explanation of the study＇s acts and outcomes. This longitudinal study demonstrates that when the aforementioned theoretical notions bridge the research-practice divide and are adopted into daily classroom teaching and learning activities, there is a qualitative and quantitative improvement in students＇ literacy learning
文摘This paper seeks to do three things： （1） examine the linguistic situation of Cameroon; （2） identify the language（s） used in education; and （3） discuss whether in the light of the social linguistic evidence, the current choice of language for education （English） is well motivated. The methodology employed is a socio-lin some randomly selected urban centers in Cameroon for example, Buea, Bamenda, Kumba, guistic survey of etc.. The results suggest among other things： （1） that Cameroon is a highly multilingual country with over 280 home languages and （2） that while English is the language for Anglophone education, Pidgin English is actually the predominant language and the first language for most Anglophones. Based on these findings, the author proposes Pidgin English as the choice language for early education in Anglophone Cameroon （the southwest and northwest regions）. Pidgin English is the only language which expresses Cameroonian reality. It is spoken by more than 70% of the population. It is the only language that is not associated with a particular tribe, religion, or with a specific colonial government.
