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This proceedings is presented in three parts. Part 1 contains summaries of the keynote speech and one paper: "Sa-Jiao: An Important Concept in Understanding Chinese Students' Social Behavior" (Jing-Jyi Wu); and "Our Choices Create Our Future: A Chinese-American Perspective" (Rose Tseng). Part 2 contains summaries of three panel sessions. The first panel session, "Cultural Identity and Social Growth of Chinese and American Students," contains presentations by Michael Chang, Yuhaw Eva Lee, and Phylis Lan Lin. The second panel session, "Chinese Language Teaching and Learning: A Cantonese and Mandarin Perspective," includes five presentations by Chen-Ching Li, K.C. Leung, Chaofen Sun, Shirley H.L. Lee, and Liana Sieto. The third panel session, "Parental Involvement in School Learning," has four presentations by Li-Rong L. Cheng, Ben Liao, Jane Chiu, and Sin-Yee Poon (in Chinese). Part 3 summarizes the poster sessions: "Chinese Language Education Issues" (Guang Yang, Liping Ma, and Terrence M. Doyle); "Instructionally Related Issues" (Xianglei Chen, Marilyn M. Y. Chi, and Mei-Yan Lu); "Learner Characteristics Issues" (Liang-Tsu Hsieh, Shwu-Yong Huang, and Shu-Ling Wang); and "Education Reform Issues" (Lu Chang and Wei-Non Shu). A list of conference participants and contributors, and advertisements (in Chinese) are appended. (SPM)

This paper explores the range of arguments and sentiments regarding the promotion and/or abolition of types of Chinese scripts. The written representations of Cantonese in Hong Kong, Mandarin in Taiwan as well as Mandarin in China are examined via issues of identity and of discourse both at national and international levels. Chinese scripts are socio-cultural artifacts whose coming into being historically represent a unique view to the understanding of Chinese modernity. Contested and contestable visions on how Chinese should be written or seen further attest to the politics of sentiments and ideologies lying behind the evolution of Chinese scripts. Writing Chinese is not just a linguistic act to translate the sound of Chinese to the graphic of Chinese. It is about how to represent Chineseness in a contested social context. The notion of homogeneity is challenged and it is argued that much of this kind of rationale from identifying the act of writing or seeing Chinese scripts or romanizations with an act of nationalism, traditionalism, or patriotism. Closer examination of how Cantonese is written vis-a-vis Mandarin and English further reveal much about the complex social and political tensions between "standard" Chinese and its linguistic others. (LR)

This paper discusses a series of oral proficiency tests in six languages developed under the auspices of the Center for Applied Linguistics and the Seattle Public Schools District. The prototype is an English test, totally oral, for use in grades K-4, designed to: (a) determine the child's ability to (1) understand and produce the distinctive characteristics of spoken English, (2) express known cognitive concepts, and (3) handle learning tasks in English; and (b) provide placement and instructional recommendations for alternate programs such as special English instruction and bilingual education. Comparable tests with similar objectives were then developed in Cantonese, Mandarin, Tagalog, Ilokano, and Spanish, reflecting some of the largest of the forty non-native-English-speaking groups in Seattle schools. Development of the tests was based on identifying basic learning concepts that children must handle in order to perform in a school setting. These concepts include identifying, classifying, quantifying, interrogating, negating and showing spatial, case and temporal relationships. The grammatical manifestations of a language that a child must handle to perceive or to communicate these concepts were then determined. The construction of the tests and the scoring methods are discussed, as well as cultural and linguistic differences encountered in the preparation of the tests. (Author/CLK)

There are between seven and eight thousand Chinese Americans living in Houston, but there has never been a predominantly Chinese neighborhood in the city. This lack of geographical focus has prevented the development of easily identifiable aspects of ethnic concentration, such as a Chinese school or a Chinese business district. Apart from the obvious racial component, Chinese ethnicity in Houston involves an individual's largely voluntary association with organizations classified as business or fraternal, religious, and educational. The Chinese language is spoken in all three categories of organizations. Both Cantonese and Mandarin are found, as well as a regional dialect of Cantonese, Taisanese. It is unusual, however, to find third-generation Chinese who speak Chinese as a mother tongue or learned language. The Chinese living in Houston do not seem to be interested in maintaining an ethnic mother tongue. There is, however, considerable interest in preserving family traditions and influence, and the future of a conscious, Chinese ethnic identity seems secure. (Author/PMP)

An experiment on relative clause formation involving Cantonese students who were learning English was conducted. The study sought to determine whether sentence combining exercises would help Chinese students construct long relative clauses instead of the short relative clauses that exist in their first language. For the experimental group each student wrote two impromptu essays, worked on sentence combining exercises for 29 days, and then wrote a third and fourth impromptu essay. The control group students did not undertake the sentence combining exercises. The task was designed to avoid self-monitoring of the writing. Attrition of the experimental group made analysis of the experiment difficult. The following results from the small number of students who completed the experiment were obtained: the control group wrote the same number of relative clauses at the beginning and end and matched the experimental group's initial efforts; and the experimental group (five students) wrote shorter sentences, as measured by number of words per T unit, and wrote fewer relatives. (SW)

This paper discusses the sociolinguistic problems inherent in multilingual testing, and the accompanying dangers of cultural bias in either the visuals or the language used in a given test. The first section discusses English-speaking Americans' perception of foreign speakers in terms of: (1) physical features; (2) speech, specifically vocabulary, syntax, phonology, morphology, and suprasegmentals; and (3) sociolinguistic factors, in terms of differences in how reality is viewed, ranking of values, interpersonal relationships, cause and effect relationships, and institutions. The Multilingual Test Development Project which resulted in the development of the MAT-SEA-CAL Oral Proficiency Tests is described. The objectives of the tests are: (1) to determine the child's ability to understand and produce the distinctive characteristics of a given language, to express known cognitive concepts, and to handle learning tasks in that language; and (2) to provide placement and instructional recommendations. The tests were developed in English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Tagalog, Ilokano, and Spanish. The principal modes of assessment were listening comprehension, sentence repetition, and structured response. Linguistic and cultural factors were considered in test preparation. The test provide a profile of students' ability to handle a given concept and of students' strengths and weaknesses in their first language and English. (CLK)

Three main issues relating to the question of silent speech in reading are considered: (1) How do Chinese speakers process Chinese ideographs in short-term memory? (2) How is Chinese students' learning of written English affected by the transition to an alphabetic language? (3) Are the strategies for encoding written words in short-term memory different for students of diverse language backgrounds? Chinese and Spanish bilingual students were tested for short-term memory encoding strategies on word-recognition tests. Chinese speakers were found to encode Chinese ideographs phonologically, but both Chinese and Spanish learners of English were found to encode English words visually. Implications for the acquisition of reading are discussed in terms of a two-stage model. (Author/CFM)

China as a place, and Chinese as a language, is seen by many to be a unitary whole. Upon closer inspection, however, a new and more diverse picture emerges. From data collected in Macao we find the rise of a mixed vernacular Cantonese-English style of communicating; this is seen most commonly and creatively in online messages shared among young adults who use WeChat. This chapter demonstrates how social media may be a platform for youth to create mixed forms and interactional patterns rooted in a local context, but also shared across greater China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study investigated the Cantonese request realizations of six year old and ten year old children. Head act, which is the minimum unit of request realizations, was selected as the research focus. The distributions and the differences of the head acts in the two age groups were explored. Twenty participants were recruited in the study. An equal number of boys and girls participated, in each age group. A sequenced cartoon request elicitation task (SCaRET) was developed to sample the request productions. Different levels of social variables including power, social distance and rank of imposition were assigned in the cartoons. The sampled request realizations were analyzed according to Cross Cultural Request Realization Project (CCSARP) procedures. Results indicated that Cantonese-speaking children had a high preferential use of query preparatory requests, and avoided the use of three direct strategies—performative, hedge performative and locution derivable requests. Possible reasons for the phenomenon were explained, and future research directions were explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a corpus-based analysis of the use of mixed code in Hong Kong speech. From transcriptions of Cantonese television programs, we identify English words embedded within Cantonese utterances, and investigate the motivations for such code-switching. Among the many motivations observed in previous research, we found that four alone account for more than 95% of the use of English words in our speech data across genres, genders, and age groups. We performed analyses over more than 60 hours of transcribed speech, resulting in one of the largest empirical studies to-date on this linguistic phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Previous research of picture naming in a picture-word interference paradigm has demonstrated independent facilitative effects of orthographic and phonological similarity in Chinese, as homophonous characters can be visually dissimilar. This study investigated the locus of orthographic priming in Chinese and assessed the hypothesis that the effect can be in part semantically based, through manipulating the extent of orthographic and semantic relatedness between target-distractor characters. Our findings replicated previous results of independent orthographic facilitation and semantic interference, as well as different time courses of these effects. More importantly, we observed longer naming latencies when the distractor was both semantically and orthographically related to the target compared with orthographically similar distractors, and an interaction between semantic and orthographic similarity. These findings suggest that orthographic facilitation on picture naming in Chinese is located at the semantic or the lemma level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]