Serenawsli

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Hello, Serenawsli, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Adam and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Adam (Wiki Ed) (talk) 01:53, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi, this is AndrewAndrewtsalmon (talk) 23:40, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

Bilingual Life in a Multilingual High School Classroom: Teaching and Learning in Cantonese and English

A study had examined the different ways where math students and their math teacher of Cantonese heritage had used different languages to achieve success academically. Twenty eight students (eighteen male students and ten female students) from Toronto, Ontario had participated in this study. Twenty five of the twenty eight were first-generation immigrants. The study was conducted to figure out strategies that immigrant students have used and developed in order to excel academically and as well as socially at school. The researchers also wanted to know the teacher's role in the students path to academic success. Goldstein and Tara observed and documented linguistic practices in the classroom, they had tape recording samples of the speech between the students and between the students and their teacher, Mrs. Lam and as well as conducting ethnographic interviews with the students and Mrs. Lam.

In the classroom, there were only eleven Cantonese-speaking students from Hong Kong (nine male students and two female students). These students have resided in Canada for various lengths of time and were all bilingual (Cantonese and English) to a certain extent. Out of the eleven students, nine of them preferred to speak Cantonese when they are with those who also speak Cantonese and only spoke English to those who do not speak Cantonese. The other two students preferred to speak in English to those who speak Cantonese and those who do not. Thus, a "language boundary" was present between the two groups of Cantonese speakers in Mrs. Lam's classroom.

The use of Cantonese was to help with social and academic benefits. Mrs. Lam's students had revealed that by speaking Cantonese among themselves, they were able to create and maintain friendships. Those friendships had benefitted the students by providing assistance that had also helped them academically. Students in this group of friends were able to provide knowledge to those who are not academically excelling as well and thus, those who have academic questions are able to ask those who have a better understanding. Hence, the interactions between the Cantonese speakers were able to help the students boost their marks to enter college. The students were able to use their linguistic resource of Cantonese to enhance their learning and understanding of math because Mrs. Lam had supported other languages other than English in her classroom.

Listening Strategies in ESL: Do Age and L1 Make a Difference?

Past studies have showed that different age groups of English as second language speakers have different methods and/ or strategies when listening to others speak in English. Some research had showed that younger children tend to be the most attentive to the information that was provided by the intonation and the stress patterns of the sentences. Whereas older children and adults tend to be more attentive to syntactic cues to sentence structures. Children in three different age groups (in grades 2, 7-8 and 11-12) that are Cantonese-speaking learners of ESL all had focused on the prosody of the English sentences that they were required to listen to.

The Cantonese Hearing in Noise Test

Over 65 million people living in Guangdong and Guangxi provinces and Hong Kong in China, Southeast Asia, Canada, the United States of America and other countries speak Cantonese or Yue, which is a form of Chinese. In this study, 568 Cantonese sentences with four to seven characters in length with the American English Hearing in Noise Test (HINT) was created. This research was conducted to see whether it was necessary to balance out the occurrence of lexical tones across sentence lists and it was also conducted to see whether the Cantonese language has any similarities in the structure and numbers of syllables as in the American English HINT. A male who was professionally trained had his voice recorded and two native Cantonese speakers verified the correct articulations of the sentences that were recorded. There were three groups of six participants had to equalize the difficulty of sentences with modal ratings of five or higher (seven was the most natural).

The results show that the proportion of vowels in the Cantonese HINT sentences was at a 41.2% whereas the American English HINT was only at 38%. Thus, Cantonese was slightly higher than American English. This is because Chinese syllables often end their sentences in vowels and not as many consonants are used in comparison to the American English language.

Article moved

Hi, Serenawsli. I moved your article to User:Serenawsli/English as a Second Language for Cantonese Heritage Speakers. All of your changes (here and on the dashboard) are still there. Nothing has been deleted.

I think it has some changes that need to be made before it can cover a topic like this. Remember, the intended audience is a global reader interested in a particular topic--they followed the link to a wikipedia article. The article itself should allow a reader to identify the subject, understand its impact or importance and place it in context. Please take a look at some existing articles in the topic area to see what kinds of information a reader might want from an article. Let me know if you need any help. Adam (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:41, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

To pick an example from the draft, what "different aspects of sentences" does the study refer to? Are those parts of speech? Do they have a wikipedia article? Sometimes we have to be imprecise--if we only know someone died in the 19th century we can write that rather than picking a year or day, but the research we're summarizing wasn't imprecise and we should help a critical and interested reader find out more about this. We don't have to write a long paragraph about what that part of speech is--identifying it and linking out is good enough. Does that help? Adam (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:02, 3 February 2016 (UTC)