The current paper discusses first investigations aimed to lay the groundwork for the development of computer-aided pronunciation training for teaching Mandarin to Germans. We conducted a contrastive analysis of the two languages leading to a set of tokens for a production and perception experiment involving German first-year students of Mandarin. Their data were perceptually evaluated by a teac...

A traditional approach to contrastive rhetoric has emphasized cultural difference in rhetorical patterns among various languages. Despite its laudable pedagogical intentions to raise teachers’ and students’ cultural and rhetorical awareness in second language writing, traditional contrastive rhetoric has perpetuated static binaries between English and other languages and viewed students as cult...

Based on a discussion of current issues in teaching business Chinese, this article proposes an ethnographic approach for the teaching of business Chinese. Specifically, it highlights the imperative for the ethnographic approach and details the components of this approach. In the discussion, reference is made to the research findings in contrastive rhetoric, ethnographic research and genre analy...

In light of the fact that L2 pronunciation errors are often caused by the transfer of well-established L1 sound systems, this paper examines some of the characteristic phonological differences between Japanese and English. Comparing segmental and suprasegmental aspects of both languages, this study also discusses several problematic areas of pronunciation for Japanese learners of English. Based...

Culture cultivating in foreign language teaching (FLT) is usually conducted through factual introductions in the form of articles, books, seminars, lectures or workshops. This approach regards L2 learners as passive receivers of cultural knowledge without their interaction involved. This paper aims at raising an interactive approach to develop L2 learner's cultural awareness through contrastive...

This paper proposes a cooperative learning algorithm to train both the undirected energy-based model and the directed latent variable model jointly. The learning algorithm interweaves the maximum likelihood algorithms for learning the two models, and each iteration consists of the following two steps: (1) Modified contrastive divergence for energy-based model: The learning of the energy-based m...

This paper describes a corpus-based contrastive study of collocation in English and Chinese. In light of the corpus-based approach to identify functionally equivalent units, the present paper attempts to identify the collocational translation equivalents of zunshou by using a parallel corpus and two comparable corpora. This study shows that more often than not, we can find in English more than ...