Factors for Sustainable Online Learning in Higher Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has affected educational institutions and instructors in an unprecedented way. The majority of educational establishments were forced to take their courses online within a very short period of time, and both instructors and students had to learn to navigate the digital array of courses without much training. Our study examined factors that affect students’ attitude toward online teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is different from other online learning studies where online courses are mostly a method of choice, with suitable support from institutions and expectation from instructors and students, rather than a contingency. Under this specific environment, we utilized an online survey to collect students’ feedback from eleven universities across Hong Kong. Using partial least squares for analysis on the 400 valid samples we received, we found that peer interactions and course design have the most salient impact on students’ attitude, whereas interactions with instructors has no effect at all on students’ attitude. Furthermore, we also provide suggestions on using the existing technologies purchased during COVID-19 for a more sustainable learning environment going forward

Contribution of discourse and morphosyntax skills to reading comprehension in Chinese dyslexic and typically developing children

This study aimed at identifying important skills for reading comprehension in Chinese dyslexic children and their typically developing counterparts matched on age (CA controls) or reading level (RL controls). The children were assessed on Chinese reading comprehension, cognitive, and reading-related skills. Results showed that the dyslexic children performed significantly less well than the CA controls but similarly to RL controls in most measures. Results of multiple regression analyses showed that word-level reading-related skills like oral vocabulary and word semantics were found to be strong predictors of reading comprehension among typically developing junior graders and dyslexic readers of senior grades, whereas morphosyntax, a text-level skill, was most predictive for typically developing senior graders. It was concluded that discourse and morphosyntax skills are particularly important for reading comprehension in the non-inflectional and topic-prominent Chinese system

The influence of L1 prosodic background on the learning of Mandarin tones : patterns of tonal confusion by Cantonese and Japanese naïve listeners

The present research investigated the effect of native language (L1) prosodic system on second language (L2) tonal acquisition. This study examines the perception of Mandarin tones before and after training by native speakers of two tone languages (Cantonese vs. Japanese), which are typologically different (i.e., a tone vs. a pitch accent system). Further, unlike previous studies, this study also attempted to explain listeners’ performance differences using PAM (Perceptual Assimilation Model). In this case, non-native tones were expected to assimilate to the native tones by the two listener groups

Perception of non-native tonal contrasts : effects of native phonological and phonetic influences

This study examined the perception of Mandarin tones by two groups of Cantonese and Japanese (naïve) listeners. An identification task was given and their responses were analyzed in terms of A-prime scores and tonal errors. The results indicated that the performance of the Cantonese listeners was compatible with that of the Japanese listeners in A-prime scores and tonal errors. The listeners’ tonal errors also showed that both the listener groups made considerable amount of errors for the T1-T4 and T2-T3 pairs, but the Cantonese listeners made more noticeable errors for the T1-T4 and T2-T3 pairs than did the Japanese listeners. The discrepancies in the performance between the two listener groups could be explained in the framework of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM: Best, 1994, 1995). The findings imply that linguistic experience of tones does not necessarily facilitate the perception of nonnative tones. However, the phonemic status and the phonetic similarities or dissimilarities between the prosodic systems of the target and native languages play a more important role in the perception of non-native tone contrasts. In addition, the results revealed some previously unnoticeable asymmetrical patterns for Mandarin tone perception by non-native listeners. Both the listener groups exhibited great confusion about the tones in the T1-T2, T1-T4, and T2-T3 pairs, but they made apparently fewer errors for the other three pairs of tones, T1-T3, T2-T4, and T3-T4. These imply that non-native tonal perception is also influenced by the phonetic characteristics of target tones

Cross-language categorization of monosyllabic foreign tones : effects of phonological and phonetic properties of native language

This study examined how native language affected the categorization of foreign tones in terms of the categories of their prosodic systems. Three typolocially different languages (Fox 2000; Yip 2002) - Hong Kong Cantonese (a syllable-timed tone language), Japanese (a mora-timed pitch-accented language), and English (a stress timed language) - were selected as the tested languages, and Mandarin was the target language. Native speakers of the three languages were naïve to Mandarin at the time of the study. Their categorization patterns of the four Mandarin tones were collected for analysis. The results indicated that listeners from the three different language backgrounds were able to categorize Mandarin tones in terms of their prosodic categories, and that both phonological and phonetic properties of native languages affected the perceptual categorizations of Mandarin tones. The findings support the new assumption of PAM for suprasegmentals (So & Best 2008, 2010b) that non-native prosodic categories (e.g., lexical tones) will be assimilated to the categories of listeners' native prosodic system (e.g., tone, pitch accent, and intonation)

Investigating the relation between place of articulation markedness and perceptual salience

It has been proposed that the POA (places of articulation) markedness scale and the corresponding faithfulness hierarchy are grounded in language-independent phonetic properties of POA (Jun 1995, 2004; Hamilton 1996, Hayes & Steriade 2004). Specifically, the coronals’ higher susceptibility to place assimilation compared to labials and dorsals was argued to follow from poorer acoustic cues to syllable-final (unreleased) coronals (3a): relatively weak VC transitions resulting from the rapid tongue tip movement (Byrd 1992, Jun 1995). The dorsals’ lesser susceptibility to place assimilation compared to labials was argued to follow from better acoustic cues to syllable-final (unreleased) dorsals: a clear convergence of F2 and F3 formants prior to the closure (Jun 1995, cf. Stevens 1989) (3b). The relation between POA markedness and acoustic/perceptual salience has since been assumed by some phonologists (e.g. Steriade 2001, Hayes & Steriade 2004). Yet little cross-linguistic perceptual work has been done to directly verify the claimed POA salience relations and their language-independent status (cf. Hume et al. 1999, Wright 2001, Kingston & Shinya 2003, Winters 2003). The goal of the current study is to explore the relation between POA markedness and salience by conducting a thoroughly controlled cross-linguistic experiment involving the perception of syllable-final stops /p t k/. The focus of the experiment will be the perception of Russian syllable-final stops by listeners of three languages: Russian, English, and Korean