Volume 40, Issue 2

Many higher education institutions around the world have established quality control systems to maintain standards. This study reports on the issue of comparing English language curricula by means of an institutional review in a northeast province in China in 2012. The study was essentially a qualitative inquiry with data collected online through documents submitted by the institutions and through semi-structured follow-up interviews. Thirty-seven participants from 12 institutions participated in the study. Research findings indicated that curriculum orientations varied across institutions and were reflected in their curriculum designs. Such a modus operandi, it is anticipated, may shed useful light on the understanding of curriculum reform currently being conducted in China in light of the rising demand for, and the needs of, internationalized and localized curricula, as well as providing an understanding of curricula at various institutions.

Teaching English to large classes is a common phenomenon in developing countries, and China is no exception. Such an issue has attracted attention of many researchers worldwide over the past two decades. However, such research in China has been relatively rare. This paper reports an investigation into teachers’ perceptions and practices of teaching English to large classes in Chinese schools. The study used both quantitative and qualitative methods to explore teachers’ attitude towards their perceived problems regarding teaching English to large classes, and the strategies they used to cope with large classes. Results show that an overwhelming majority of the Chinese English teachers (92.6%) hold a negative attitude towards teaching English in large classes. Pedagogical issues, management-related difficulties and psychological burden emerged as major obstacles. Despite these problems, teachers were seeking strategies to cope with the problems in their daily practices with more or less success.

The present study investigated the effects of explicit metapragmatic instruction on foreign language learners’ performance of compliment responses (CRs). Eighty-two non-English major students participated in this study. They were randomly assigned to two groups, an experimental group that received explicit metapragmatic instruction on compliment responses and a control group that did not. A pretest-posttest research design was adopted. The data were collected through a written discourse completion task (WDCT) with six scenarios concerning the topics of appearance, performance, and personality. The results revealed that learners who received explicit instruction dramatically decreased their use of Accept strategy and increased Combination (CB) strategy at the macro level; more specifically, a decrease in Appreciation and an increase in Accept + Accept at the micro level. The learners of the control group made little progress in their performance. The study sheds light on pragmatics learning in an EFL setting and provides implications for pragmatics pedagogy.

This article reports a study on the impact of L2 Korean on L1 Chinese lexical diversity and grammar in written expressions by Chinese bilinguals proficient in Korean. The statistical analysis showed that the cross-linguistic effects of L2 on L1 were significant although such impact was bidirectional. There were significantly more grammar errors and longer retrieval time committed by the bilingual group which implied negative L2 transfer to L1. Meanwhile, L2 also showed a positive influence on lexical diversity as there was no decline in lexical richness but an increase in lexical variations, and this indicated that L2-induced patterns did not replace or deteriorate L1 but instead added additional options to L1 expressions. This phenomenon can be characterized as the addition of new concepts and linguistic options to the already-existing L1 and conceptual repertoire. Specifically, meta-linguistic competence was enhanced. This research supports the theory of interference on L1 by the use of L2 (negative transfer), but it could also be enhanced by L2 (positive transfer).

The scientific literature of humor processing between 2000 and 2016 was reviewed by means of scientometric methods. The clustered and visualized document co-citation network of the humor processing knowledge domain was analyzed in terms of common topics and content of co-cited references. Emerging trends of humor processing were detected through reference citation bursts. The combined dataset of 816 bibliographic records and 42,687 references was compiled through a basic topic search. In order to ensure adequate coverage of the field, the search was expanded to include literature that referenced literature found in the initial basic topic search. Results produced a document co-citation network of humor processing with ten clusters, which showed that social cognition and fMRI study both served as important foundations for work in this knowledge domain. Personality studies in humor processing as well as research about the right hemisphere’s role in humor processing also received considerable attention. These key areas of study accounted for 4 clusters. The remaining six clusters included studies on sexual selection, figurative language, prejudice, facial expression, sleep deprivation and infant humor perception associated with the knowledge domain. In this study, burst detection in references revealed topics of high interest to researchers as well as emerging trends in humor processing research.

This study consists of two questionnaire surveys conducted in two stages to investigate factors that high-stakes exam essay raters believe to affect their rating behavior. Raters were all university Chinese teachers of English majors. Seventy-three participants in stage one and 75 in stage two responded to the same questionnaire. Both exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were used in data analysis. Results showed that there were generally six broad factors interfering with the rating process: rating scale, rater training, rating supervision, rater characteristics, eye-catching text features and rating condition. The interaction of those factors reflected the tension between the constraints executed by the test institution and raters’ own knowledge and understanding of essay rating. This study may shed light on measures taken to improve essay rating quality.