Volume 43, Issue 2

This article considers “good” teachers in the context of current developments in universities in China to reach a “gold standard” of considerably higher and more challenging levels of teaching and learning. We outline this context and consider concepts of good teachers in classical Chinese traditions and more recent Western thinking as a possible dialogue within and between cultures of learning. Using cognitive and cultural linguistic perspectives, we analyze metaphorical concepts of “gold” in “the gold standard” as related to teachers. We report our applied metaphor research which analyzes Chinese students’ expectations, values and beliefs about good university language teachers; this presents a rich picture beyond developing knowledge, skills and understanding to include strong social and moral characteristics. Other aspects which recognize the complexity of “good” teachers show a student appreciation of teachers’ tireless effort, devotion and selfless sacrifice: these aspects are absent in many discussions of good teachers. The participant-centered picture from elicited metaphor analysis is part of students’ “cultures of learning,” but this should be developed culturally for the gold standard through further teacher development and student engagement. In line with interaction in cultures of learning, we indicate some classroom ways to extend students’ thinking through scaffolding teacher-student interaction based on textbook activities.

This article aims to help teacher-researchers engage in empirical research on classroom-based assessment for formative purposes. We will first introduce the key features of classroom-based formative assessment (CBFA), and analyze the research questions asked in round-one projects funded by the Fund for Assessment Research (FAR) in Foreign Language Education in China. Next, we will illustrate how some research questions can be answered by analyzing a video-taped lesson from a round-one FAR project. We conclude by calling for more teacher-led research and argue that research on CBFA by teachers will not only produce valid interpretations and applicable findings, but also constitute a viable model for teacher professional development.

This paper reports a five-year computer-mediated intercultural exchange project between Chinese and American university students that explores the use of various social media tools with WeChat application as the main medium in collaborative intercultural assignments. The study combines quantitative and qualitative approaches by using questionnaires and action research, to investigate how Chinese EFL and American CFL learners increase their intercultural communication competence by assessing their knowledge, awareness, attitudes, and skills of discovery and awareness. The findings reveal their changes and progress in the following variables: knowledge about the variety and subtlety of both the home and target cultures, a different worldview, and cultural study methods; awareness of the importance of differences and similarities between the home and target cultures, their negative reactions to these differences (e.g., fear, ridicule, disgust, feeling of superiority, etc.) and therefore, critical evaluation of the target and home cultures; attitudes from excitement or blind admiration of the target culture to confusion, anxiety or frustration about the cultural differences, later to toleration and appreciation of cultural differences, adaptation to the target culture, and eventually to openness and readiness to suspend disbelief about other cultures and belief about one’s own; skills to contrast the target culture with their own, to demonstrate a capacity to interact appropriately in a variety of different social situations in the target culture and resolve cross-cultural conflicts and misunderstandings. This research will serve as a valuable reference for computer-mediated intercultural communication teaching and open up new possibilities to extend classroom teaching by bridging the gap between second-hand knowledge and hands-on experience.

This study aimed at comparing the level of social presence generated in a voice-based chat room and a text-based forum when learners tried to build personal relationships and form an online community for learning on an online language course in China. A mixed-method approach was taken for the study, drawing on data from questionnaires to find out about student perception of social presence, and postings of text messages and audio messages in the communication of the student learning process to search for students’ projected social presence in terms of affective, interactive and cohesive features. Interviews were also conducted to supplement additional information with the hope of forming a complete picture of social presence in the reality of an online learning environment. The text-based forum and the voice-based chat room were found to have a different impact on student social presence. In terms of student perception, most of them were more likely to get to know peers in the text-based forum and thus developed a sense of community in their learning process of the online course. Yet they believed that the voice-based chat room had the advantage of helping them with course learning. In the actual interaction, the voice-based chat room was more interactive although the text-based forum was more affective and cohesive. But in terms of the affective category, the problem with the existing framework in literature was that there were no prosodic features included. Therefore, in future more research is needed to probe for the relationship between prosodic sound features and social presence, and the present theoretic framework must be extended. In interviews, students explained that in the voice-based chat room prosodic features led to higher peer awareness, which further reinforced this need.

In view of a series of challenges since Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) was introduced into China, we interviewed 14 front-line teachers in primary and secondary schools about their viewpoints and classroom strategies of TBLT. The results show teachers’ willingness to use TBLT. They adopt flexible teaching procedures, apply TBLT creatively, and explore task-based language assessment. The authors argue for inclusive non-doctrinaire approaches to TBLT, and propose to construct localized TBLT theory and practice with Chinese characteristics.

English gerund construction is a system composed of 3 variants, including “Gerund + ø”, “Gerund + of + NP”, and “Gerund + NP”. The noun and verb attributes of the 3 variants are recursive, and in theory their frequencies vary regularly in different styles. An abstract is placed before the beginning of an academic papers, which has the basic characteristics of conciseness and generalization, and has special requirements for the use of gerunds. The purpose of this study was to empirically explore the system of gerund construction in abstracts of natural science and social science papers, and to specifically explore the inherent characteristics of noun and verb properties of the 3 variants. For this purpose, two corpora were constructed, one is about abstracts of natural science papers, and the other is about abstracts of social science papers. Finally, the results of chi-square test showed that there was no significant difference in the frequencies of the 3 variants in the abstracts of natural science and social science papers, and the two corpora can be studied as a whole. In the combined corpus, there were significant differences in the frequencies of the 3 gerund variants. The frequencies of these 3 variants and their gerund properties showed a recursive change.

This paper investigates the phenomenon of imbalance between the frequencies of the nice and Adj and Adj and nice patterns from the perspective of humans’ social and limited-processing-capacity attributes. Humans’ social attribute requires that language users stay informative with minimal effort in communication, resulting in the from-the-least-to-the-most-informative information organization in discourse. Their limited-processing-capacity attribute requires that they resort to the production biases of “easy first” and “plan reuse” in order to achieve communicative efficiency in real-time production. The analysis of the occurrences of the nice and Adj pattern and native speakers’ judgment of the degree of informativeness of nice in these occurrences suggest that nice is largely delexicalized. Such delexicalization makes nice and Adj consistent with the information organization and allows language users to stay informative with the use of the pattern, thus in line with the social attribute, but not Adj and nice . In the meantime, nice is not only highly frequent but also conceptually salient when it comes to the positive property (Panther & Thornburg, 2009), making nice and Adj easier to produce and more likely to be reused than Adj and nice , thus in line with the limited-processing-capacity attribute. The analysis of the unbalanced frequency of the two patterns suggests that human attributes should be considered when studying language form, and this should offer insights into English learning.