Bidirectional transfer of definition skills and expressive vocabulary knowledge in Chinese-English dual language learners

ABSTRACT

Though Mandarin Chinese dual language immersion (DLI) has been growing rapidly in the U.S., research on this population is still rare. This study explored cross-language transfer of expressive oral vocabulary knowledge and definition skills among students in a Chinese DLI program. We found significant within and cross-language relationships of aspects of definition skills and cross-language relationships between expressive vocabulary and definition skills. Hierarchical regression revealed strong predictive association within and across languages for definition skills. Moderation analysis revealed that Chinese vocabulary knowledge had a moderating effect on the transfer of the syntagmatic aspect of Chinese definition skill to the corresponding skill in English. Educational implications and research recommendations are discussed in relation to an expanding framework of cross-language transfer.

KEYWORDS:

• Definition skill
• vocabulary knowledge
• cross-language transfer
• dual language immersion

Appreciation

The authors wish to thank the participating school, parents and children. The authors also appreciate the assistance with data collection and coding from the following research assistants: Victoria Mei Crewdson, Emily Fowler, Gloria Fu, Laura Guo, Kailey Hegedus, Angelina Huang, Yana Kulyk, Alan Li, Emma Lin, Isabel Pfeifer, Alex Tang, Ryan Whalen, Jieyu Zhou, Ashley Xiao and Jasmine Xie. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and their many insightful comments and suggestions. All remaining errors remain our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 In this article, we use Mandarin and Chinese interchangeably.

2 Defining words in Chinese is similar to that in English; both involve the use of a superordinate term, followed by words characterizing features of the target word. The only difference is that if relative clause is used in the definition, the modifying clause must be placed before the target noun. For example, 火车(train) can be defined in following syntactic structures in Chinese:

(1) 火车是一种交通工具，它必须在铁轨上运行。

A train is one-CL transportation, it must be on tracks operate.

 ‘A train is a kind of transportation; it must run on tracks.’

(2) 火车是一种必须在铁轨上运行的交通工具。

A train is one type of must be on tracks operate NOM transportation tools.

‘A train is a type of transportation that must operate on tracks.’

3 An Individualized Education Plan is a program in elementary or secondary educational institutions which provides specialized instruction and related services to a child with an identified disability (https://sites.ed.gov/idea/regs/b/d/300.320).

4 Analysis code and statistical analysis output can be found at: https://osf.io/nty23/?view_only=46ec6310398445d2b5c11fb830c2c180

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Royalty Research Fund (RRF), University of Washington [grant no FA191089].

Notes on contributors

Chan Lü

Chan Lü Ph.D. Associate Professor, Department of Asian Languages and Literature, University of Washington, Seattle,WA, United States.

Amy E. Pace

Amy E. Pace CCC-SLP, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Speech & Hearing Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States.

Sihui Ke

Sihui (Echo) Ke Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Second Language Acquisition, Department of Modern & Classical Languages Literatures & Cultures, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, United States.