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This paper reports on the results of a quantitative study that was aimed to measure the use of socio-cultural strategies in learning English writing among a group of 155 Chinese university English major students. This quantitative survey was informed by the socio-cultural theory that holds that L2 learning is a mediational process in which a couple of socio-cultural factors tend to mediate the learning of the second/foreign language. The use of writing strategies was thus conceptualized by an array of mediational factors and measured by a self-designed questionnaire. Descriptive techniques were applied to analyze the collected data. The results revealed that the surveyed participants endorsed a medium to high level of socio-cultural writing strategies. They reported to most frequently use role-mediated strategies in their English writing learning, followed by sign-mediated strategies, rule-mediated strategies, community-mediated strategies, and tool-mediated strategies respectively. The results are implicative for L2 writing learning and instruction.

The cultural information transferred by language is an important part of Business English teaching. Therefore, teachers of Business English should not only improve the language level of the students, but also develop the students' cross-cultural understanding. The cultivation of intercultural business communication (IBC) competence could not be realized by one or several courses, it must be emphasized through the entirety of Business English teaching. For example, elements of intercultural training should be reflected in Business English teaching materials, classroom discourse, teaching activities, and teaching methodology. This paper analyzed the afore-mentioned elements of IBC competence. Utilizing literature reviews and questionnaires, it also revealed problems in teaching and cultivating IBC competence in Business English curriculum and examined what obstacle Chinese students experience in intercultural communication. The author of this paper proposed three principles that should be followed while integrating IBC competence and Business English teaching in order to realize the simultaneous increase of course knowledge and IBC competence, and to further students' professional knowledge, English language ability, and intercultural business fluency.

This paper reports part of a broader qualitative case study of Asian students "translation" (Agar, 2006) to study in an Australian university. The paper is concerned with the experiences of eight participants and their involvement in a training programme in the use of language learning strategies (LLS) to support their engagement with second language (L2) academic and social discourses. Agar's (1994) concept of languaculture is used to frame the study. The participants' ability to translate between languaculture 1 (LC1--their home linguistic and cultural context) and languaculture 2 (LC2--the linguistic and cultural context of Australia) is investigated. The findings indicate that LLS can be assistive in this process but that there are contextual and linguistic factors that mediate success. These findings, and the data from the study, have enabled a refinement of Agar's (1994; 2006) languaculture model to better accommodate how training in the use of LLS can support translation from LC1 to LC2.

Despite the steady growth in the recruitment and education of MBA students in China, there is a dearth of research on MBA students' perceptions of Business English Writing (BEW) in this context. This paper conducts a qualitative inquiry into Chinese MBA students' perceptions of BEW in English as a foreign language context in China. Forty-four MBA students of a ten-week BEW course participated in this study. An open-ended questionnaire was used near the end of the course to elicit their work-related writing needs, self-reflections on BEW abilities, and perceptions of the BEW course. A focus group was conducted with six students to provide insights into the students' work-related writing experience. The results showed that the students' work-related writing needs differed in terms of their respective job positions, with those working in foreign-funded enterprises or joint ventures having more job-related demands to write in English than those working at state-owned enterprises. Moreover, the students generally regarded their BEW abilities as moderately good or low, with distinct expectations of the BEW course raised. Pedagogic implications were drawn for improving BEW course in the Chinese context.

In China, English classroom is the main place of English language acquisition. Therefore, how to improve English classroom teaching effectively has become the scholars' concern. This paper reports a study conducted at North China Electric Power University on the functions of western cultural nonverbal behaviors in English classroom in China. Questionnaires with both close-ended and open-ended questions were distributed to the students. By means of quantitative and qualitative research methods, this paper analyzed the functions of western cultural nonverbal behaviors in English classroom and found that: 1) as a foreign language teacher you need not only to speak foreign language but also transmit cultural knowledge to students; 2) the nonverbal behaviors which reflect the western culture can have the positive effects on second language learning; 3) Non-verbal behavior should be involved in the teaching and learning processes.

The English immersion teaching approach adopted by SEIB of GDUFS in China was developed on the basis of the immersion theory which was originally developed in North America. Its purpose is to create a learning environment in which the students acquire knowledge in business with English as the main carrier. The adoption of this approach aims to cultivate students with qualifications in both English language proficiency and business knowledge and skills. EDIF is one of the departments within SEIB that has implemented this approach since its establishment in 2001. The paper analyzes the implementation of English immersion teaching approach in the teaching of finance in EDIF from the perspectives of curriculum design, teacher training and recruitment, textbook selection and compilation and classroom teaching. Finally by comparing the results of language proficiency tests of EDIF students and those of the English majors of other colleges in China and by analyzing the employment situation of EDIF graduates, this paper concludes that students of EDIF outperform the other college students in both English language proficiency and employment competitive advantage. This indicates that English immersion teaching approach adopted by EDIF is effective and successful in the cultivation of students in both English proficiency and business knowledge.

Anxiety experienced in the course of learning a foreign language is specific and unique (Horwitz et al., 1986; MacIntyre & Gardner, 1989). This paper reports a study on anxiety in Chinese undergraduate non-English majors at three different proficiency levels in a three-week immersion summer camp. By way of survey, interviews, reflective journals and observations, this research seeks to investigate the relationship between anxiety and native-speaking teacher's teaching and extracurricular activities in an immersion summer camp. Specifically, it tries to explore that (1) whether a considerable number of students at each level felt anxious when speaking to native-speaking teachers and volunteers in and out of classroom in the summer camp setting, (2) whether the more proficient students tend to be less anxious in the summer camp setting, (3) whether the students felt less anxious when they learn English and western cultures not for any examination. Based on the findings, some suggestions for future teaching and research are proposed.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the efficiency of the core schema-based instruction (SBI) in learning English prepositions between two groups that were placed depending on learners' level of English proficiency. The SBI in the present study refers to a way of teaching in which the schematic core meaning of a given lexical item is provided. This is essentially different from the translation-based instruction (TBI) in that the SBI, which takes cognitive linguistics (CL) as its theoretical basis, provides learners with a single abstract core meaning in vocabulary learning, whereas the TBI provides a list of several meanings and learners memorize it without a chance of paying attention to the semantic connection among its meanings. The efficiency of the SBI in comparison with the TBI has been investigated in the previous studies with high expectation, but not all of them have shown its significant achievement over the TBI. For this reason, several researchers have pointed out that the effects of the SBI may be influenced by learners' English proficiency level (e.g., Cho, 2016; Imai, 2016). However, this issue has not been fully explored empirically. The participants of this study, 41 students at a technical college in Japan, learned the six English prepositions ("at", "in", "on", "to", "for", "with") in accordance with the SBI. Then the participants were divided into two groups depending on the results of their TOEIC Bridge scores that they took about one month before this study. In order to assess the difference in efficiency between the two groups, pre- and post-tests targeting the six prepositions were used. The results of the pre- and post-test scores and t-tests suggested that the SBI worked more effectively for the learners with higher English proficiency than the ones with lower English proficiency.

This study, carried out at a major technological university in China and based on a convenience sample of 116 students, is designed to identify which aspects of their classroom environments had the greatest effect on the students. Students completed a 26-item questionnaire which elicited general as well as specific views on the EFL classroom environments. The students were divided into English majors (n = 64) and non-English majors (n = 52). The results showed that, among the items rated as less satisfactory, eight items were similar for both groups, but that the items with lowest satisfaction for each group were significantly different. For English majors textbook selection, learning atmosphere, and teachers' chalkboard presentation are least satisfactory; for non-English majors interest in target culture, teachers' chalkboard presentation, and internal motivation are the least satisfactory. The paper concludes that English-language education should be treated differently for majors and non-majors. For English majors, to improve the learning atmosphere, textbook selection and teaching methods need be considered as priorities. English-language education for non-majors should be redesigned with a focus on functional use of the language rather than in-depth study of the target culture.

Central to argumentative writing is the proper use of epistemic devices (EDs), which distinguish writers' opinions from facts and evaluate the degree of certainty expressed in their statements. Important as these devices are, they turn out to constitute a thorny area for non-native speakers (NNS). Previous research indicates that Chinese EFL learners differ significantly from the native speakers (NS) in marking epistemic modality. One problem of previous studies is that the essay topics are not well controlled, which makes it somewhat ambiguous as to whether the observed linguistic discrepancies are caused by the NNS/NS difference or by the topic differences. This paper sets out to explore much more comparable data from International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE). The results show that while both NS group and NNS groups are heavily dependent on a restricted range of items, the manipulation of epistemic modality is particularly problematic for the L2 students who employ syntactically simpler constructions and rely on a more limited range of devices, as already discovered in the previous studies. Nevertheless, this study also shows that the most proficient L2 students modify their statements with less certainty markers and more tentative expressions than do their L1 counterparts, and that all learner groups, regardless of their overall language proficiency, use less boosters than L1 writers, which is in sharp contrast with previous studies. The ability to mark epistemic modality has much to do with L2 proficiency. While lower-band students exhibit a heavy reliance on a narrower range of items for strong assertions, higher-band students tend to be more tentative and demonstrate a more native-like use of some Eds. The observed patterns are explained in the light of the inherent properties of English EDs, the imperfect modal instruction and learner factors.

Specificity, as a dimension of cognitive construal, refers to the capacity of a speaker to describe an entity or a situation in different accuracy and details (Langacker, 2008), which is linguistically reflected in lexical and grammatical levels (Wen, 2012). Modifiers can extend a simple sentence into a long and complicated one (Weng, 2007), indicating how accurately and substantially an entity or a situation is depicted by a writer. Cognitive linguistics holds the concept that thoughts can be reflected in language (Zhang, 2007) and accordingly the choice of lexical terms and grammatical structures can project the writers' intention and preference (Wen, 2012). Given the projective significance of grammatical structures, the study on the usage of modifiers in EFL writings can demonstrate the projection of specificity and investigate the writers' cognitive activity during writing. Although numerous studies about EFL wring have been done from the perspective of cognitive linguistics in the past decades, research aiming at the cognitive process during writing has been far from satisfaction. Hence, this study will analyze the usage of modifiers and how it projects specificity in specific writing. 20 writing papers are randomly selected as samples written by the second-year college EFL Learners from Leshan Normal University, Leshan, China. Data about the usage of modifiers in each sample are collected by dividing each sentence into smaller unit of modifiers centering on nouns and verbs, ensuring the specificity of each sample to be analyzed in a quantitative level. The study concludes that the writers are inclined to apply modifiers for specificity to a certain extent but the lack of modifier diversity and the partial choice of familiar modifiers indicate monotonous descriptions and personal preference to project certain aspects of an entity or a situation.

Prominence, as an important dimension of cognitive construal, refers to the capacity to evoke a certain substructure as the focus of attention, which can be materialized in a variety of semantic and grammatical expressions (Langacker, 1987). Subject of a sentence (Zhang, 2011) and specific sentence structures (Lin, 2013) can bring a substructure into salience by highlighting it in a specifically grammatical place. Accordingly, the place of subject or the specific sentence structures which are applied to emphasize certain information can reflect a writer's intention of prominence. Thus, this essay will take prominence of Langacker's cognitive construal as theoretical basis and has an empirical study on information prominence of 20 argumentative writing papers written by Chinese college EFL learners from Leshan Normal University. By categorizing the sentences of each sample into five types of structures--link verb sentence, active sentence, passive sentence, non-finite verbs as subject and the specific sentence patterns, and referring to the statistics of sentence structure application and the specific writing contents, it is found out that the writers are inclined to highlight subjective or static information, which leads to subjectivity and powerlessness of argumentation.

Based on a widely held belief that immersion provides the best language learning opportunities, a large number of Asian students go to English-speaking countries to improve their English language skills. These strongly motivated learners arrive in a new country with a bag of expectations, learner beliefs, and imaginations about the new community they are about to enter. However, learners are often faced with a set of challenges with respect to language learning opportunities and identity negotiations in the new community. Against this background, the present study examined three cases of Korean learners enrolled in an intensive English program (IEP) in the U.S. The aim of the study was to understand distinct struggles experienced by this learner population. The study found that the participants had certain motivations and imaginations about the new communities, but they experienced numerous challenges and struggles particularly with regard to opportunities for authentic communications in English and identity conflicts. The paper discusses pedagogical implications for an effective IEP curriculum to allow students more opportunities for legitimate periphery participation in the target language communities of practice.

Vocabulary is the basis of any language learning. To many Chinese non-English majors it is difficult to memorize English words. This paper applied associative method in presenting new words to them. It is found that associative method did receive a better result both in short-term and long-term retention of English words. Compared with the traditional way, associative method was more efficient in the retention of polysyllabic words, monosyllabic and disyllabic words. In addition, the differences were very significant. However, forgetting greatly influenced the long retention of English words. Therefore, teachers should encourage learners to review what they learned in class frequently, and learners themselves should participate actively in associative learning.

The paper makes a contrastive study on the performance of verb-noun collocation given by Chinese EFL learners based on the CLEC, ICLE and BNC. First, all the concordance lines with the token "ability" in the CLEC were collected and analyzed. Then, they were tagged manually in order to sort out the sentences in the verb-noun collocation structure. After that, a contrast was made between the data in the three corpora. The study found that there was a distinct gap between the use of verb-noun collocation between English native speakers and Chinese EFL learners, and that Chinese EFL learners also gave less satisfactory performance in verb-noun collocation in terms of correctness and appropriateness.

Appropriacy is the paramount consideration of such an inherently polite speech act as thanking in its use. Traditional study of thanking focuses more on the quantitative investigation of its diverse forms and functions than on interpretation of the process in which it is used appropriately and adequately or not among English native or nonnative speakers. This paper particularly explores how to make the speech act of thanking appropriate and acceptable in dynamic context from the perspective of Chinese EFL learners who tend to respond in mute English or Chinglish in cross-culture thanking situation through analysis of the spoken discourse based on cognitive and cultural comparative approach. It contents that in foreign language learning environment, L2 contextual knowledge also comes into compensation for the lack of authentic context compatible with L2 use in the diachronic process of EFL learning as L1 contextual knowledge does. In a specific communicative situation, the learner has to manipulate his contextual cognition consciously and make an appropriate choice among linguistic or strategic forms activated by the two types of contextual knowledge stored in memory. The choice-making needs considering adaptation to dynamic context like the objects of gratitude, the benefactor's psychological state and the communicative social context as the most important parameters. Only in that way is appropriacy of thanking possible in cross-cultural communication.

This paper reports on a focused investigation into the immediate effects of oral narrative task repetition by two adult EFL learners of intermediate and high proficiency. Two participants performed a narrative speaking task after watching a cartoon video clip and repeated their performance three times, followed by a retrospective report in an interview. The results showed that repetition of narrative tasks increased fluency and accuracy, while complexity was the least sensitive to the practice effect. At the same time, it was found that the learners had generally correct self-perception of their performances, which was the interaction of enhanced repeated performance, fatigue, and their proficiency levels.

Research in EFL and ESL has confirmed that self-efficacy affects language learners' choices of learning tasks, persistence, motivation and achievement. As a cognitive construct, self-efficacy can be strengthened by both outcomes of behaviors and input from the environment. This paper studies the effects of an English Bar, a self-access center for students to practice oral English, on Chinese college students' self-efficacy enhancement. The study's questionnaire and in-depth interviews reveal that students who often go to the Bar to speak in English demonstrate considerably higher levels of self-efficacy than their peers who seldom or never visit the Bar. Finally, the implications and limitations of the study are discussed.

The paper discusses the infinitive errors made by Chinese college students. From the CLEC, all infinitive errors tagged as [vp5] are collected, and then the general distribution of the errors among 4 groups of college students is shown. Moreover, these errors are classified into 12 categories according to the characteristics of the usage. After manual classification, we can see the main distribution features of these errors clearly. The most common infinitive errors fall into the category of "doing?do", i.e. misuses of a gerund where a base verb should be used. It is surprised to find that the category of "do?did/done" ranks the second in the number of errors in the CLEC in which case Chinese learners use the structure of "to + the past tense or past participle of a verb" in their written works. Finally, possible causes of these errors are given and ways to avoid them are suggested.

The communicative competence is the ultimate goal of the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), which is thought to be the eclectic approach in the place of other approaches and methods and which begins to gain momentum in the recent years. Hence, the comprehensive understanding of the communicative competence is prerequisite to the cultivation of the students' communicative competence. This study did some investigation with a view to elaborating the cultivation of learners' English communicative competence in China. It did an investigation into 9 senior middle schools in Anhui, China. 9 schools in three areas were visited. About 400 students were asked to do a questionnaire on the self-assessment of their English communicative competence. 27 English teachers and 9 headmasters/mistresses were interviewed about their teaching practice in senior middle school. Based upon the data collected from the investigation, the paper puts forward some problems as well as some suggestions in the implementation of the cultivation of students' communicative competence.

Reading plays a dominant role among the four skills in foreign language acquisition for college students. Unfortunately, over the past few decades, English teaching practice shows that Chinese students are vulnerable in it. Both their reading speed and their reading skills are far from being satisfactory. Schema theory presents a very efficient course in developing students' reading skills and improving their reading abilities. Based on a descriptive research, this paper aims to expound on the schema theory, its activation and construction on college English reading class. The research shows that the application of the theory is fulfilled throughout the whole reading process by designing various activities before, during and after the reading. The results testifies the assumption that its application is beneficial to cultivate students' reading interest, quicken their reading speed and make proper judgments.

The article gives information on English language teaching schemes in Indian classrooms for foreign students. The teacher monitors as facilitator and instructor. The trainees were trained in the four macro skills, LSRW. I taught some topics in three skills, namely, writing, listening and reading (just three, not speaking skills) to Chinese students in VIT University. The other skill speaking was trained by other teachers among the four. Students were trained to listen to English words and passages, to read the comprehension passages and answer the questions, and to coach basic grammar and revising it. More over, beginners were also guided to learn technical words related to their respective disciplines (major subjects) other than English words. For example, Chinese students posed a query to the faculty to explain on technical words and terms of their main subjects in English, for instance, B.Sc Computer Science (under graduate programme) students wished to learn about the word "data". Since, the English Oxford Dictionary meaning is "facts or statistics used for reference or analysis", but in the field of Computer Science, the word means "information processed by a computer". So, there arouses a need to help them in distinguishing the different meanings of the word. In addition to, many students were not familiar with English. Thus through the above said way of facilitating, they acquired a good knowledge by varied types of expressions to master their particular subjects. It was a moment to state that they had come from China to India to obtain the nuances of English language. They undertook and were gradually expertised at specific courses in English medium of instruction, perhaps to get degree. Teacher's a few lesson plans (how the practices are conducted in listening, reading and writing skills) as well as some parts in allotted syllabus (listening to songs, passages, writing a paragraph and essay, picture-story writing and write about yourself, reading the passage and writing) were discussed in the current paper. Role of the teacher and student were explained in detail. Therefore, the abstract would portray how the beginners were trained, taught, convinced, persuaded and managed by a tutor to reach the goal of English language teaching to Chinese students.

This paper reported findings on a contrastive analysis of epistemic expressions in argumentative essays between NS and NNS Chinese L2 writers. Based on an examination of a NS corpus and a NNS learner corpus across four proficiency levels, the study shows there is great similarity in the total number of epistemic devices used per thousand words between the NS and NNS university students' written texts. However, the NNS were found to use a restricted range of epistemic items to express epistemic modality and their written texts were marked by strong, unwarranted assertions compared with those of NS students. The study suggested there seems to be an improvement in selecting an appropriate level of commitment to the propositions being expressed with the increase in the students' proficiency.

This paper attempts to tap the relationship between metacognitive strategy training and vocabulary learning of college students through a five week training program. It aims to answer the following question: Can metacognitive strategy training facilitate vocabulary learning of Chinese college students? Both questionnaire and tests were used in the study. One hundred and thirty-four students participated in the study; one class of 68 which received both cognitive vocabulary training and metacognitive training comprised the experimental group; the other class of 66 students served as the control group and received only cognitive strategy training without metacognitive component. The metacognitive strategy training for vocabulary learning of these students proved to be effective. The experimental group outperformed the control group in the post-training vocabulary test and the questionnaire displayed in what aspects the students improved on these metacognitive strategies.

This paper is a research in the second Language acquisition (SLA) with its focus on the role of input, interaction and output in the development of oral fluency in the EFL context from both a theoretical point of view and a case study. Two instruments were used: tests of oral fluency and face-to-face interviews. The findings showed that non-native oral fluency could be obtained through efficient and effective input, interaction and output in EFL while on the other hand they suggested answers to the question why most Chinese English learners failed to speak English fluently, namely lacking effective input and output, having no real need for interaction, attaching too much importance to language forms and written tests.

This paper intends to explore how Taiwanese university students perceive their native-speaking English teachers (NESTs). Mutual expectations between the NESTs and students are also investigated. Collected data include questionnaires from 107 students and interviews with three NESTs and 19 students who have filled out the questionnaire. The result shows that students expect more encouragement and interaction with the NESTs, and more relaxed activities with fewer assignments and tests. A third of the students expect NEST with a standard accent, while a quarter do not care about accent at all. The NESTs reveal their dissatisfaction toward the students' passiveness and lack of responsiveness. While students expect their NESTs to be interactive, they themselves seem to give the NESTs an impression of unwillingness to participate. The discussion centers on this dilemma and offers some suggestions for English teachers.

This paper aims at providing some information concerning the impact of strategies-based instruction on listening comprehension. First the author briefly reviews some literature relating to this issue, and then focuses on a study conducted in English major at Jiangsu University of Science & Technology. This study is set out to examine the contribution that formal strategies-based instruction might offer learners to their improving listening proficiency. 44 senior students in English major, varying in performance in English learning (with the consideration of students' scores in TEM-4), are sampled. The Microsoft Excel is undertaken to analyze sample materials and data. Despite the limitation of the study, the final results indicate that strategies-based instruction plays a positive role in determining students' improvement in listening comprehension. The pedagogical implication of the study is that: if the instructors systematically introduce and reinforce strategies that can help students to improve listening competence and that are specially designed for any given test, their students may well improve the performance on language tasks. The study also seems to endorse the notion of integrating strategy training into the classroom instructional plan and embedding strategies into daily language tasks.

This paper is a general study of one of varieties of English--China English and its influence on English Language Teaching (ELT) for English majors. The status of English as an International language breaks the situation in which British English or American English is the sole standard. English becomes World Englishes, taking on a plural form, which include many varieties of English with nativized cultural, political and economical characteristics. Researchers in China believe that China English as a variety of English has been objectively in existence and become a lingua franca. It consolidates the cultural identity of the Chinese speakers of English, enriches the multiple identities of English and plays an important role in promoting Chinese culture internationally. For teachers of English majors, it presents challenges to their traditional view of language teaching.

Since the phenomenon of fossilization in interlanguage is proposed by Selinker in 1972, it has drawn much attention and commonly acknowledged at home and abroad. This paper introduces the definition, classification, presentation, and causal factors of fossilization in an attempt to help Chinese students better understand the phenomenon and avoid its influence by the proposal of some suggestions.