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The need for collaboration between researchers and practitioners to address the research-practice gap is a long-debated topic in applied linguistics. Little is known, however, about how researchers and practitioners can collaboratively develop teaching materials, as a potential venue to narrow the gap. This study explored how two groups of professionals in China worked together to develop textbook materials and achieved bi-directional knowledge flow. In addition, the textbooks were analyzed in light of how participants contributed to the co-authored product. Interviews with four researchers and three practitioners along with their written reflections revealed relatively equal and constructive collaborative relationships in which multi-directional knowledge flow, co-creation of new knowledge, and positive emotional interactions emerged. Though subtle, the collaboration was reflected on the nature of the developed textbooks. With a nuanced interpretation of the complexity of researcher-practitioner collaboration, we highlight the emotional dimension of collaboration and the need to pay attention to the person in the collaboration when examining a research-practice relationship.

This study investigates foreign language teachers’ beliefs about information and communication technology (ICT) and factors contributing to their belief formation through in-depth interviews with eight teachers and the principal of a public primary school. The participants held overall slightly positive attitudes towards the effectiveness of ICT in English education but believed it played only a subsidiary role in their pedagogical practices and professional development. Elementary English teachers’ ICT-related beliefs were shaped by individual-, institutional-, and policy-level factors. The study extends belief-related components of the technology acceptance model (TAM) by clarifying the external variables into three-level factors. The results suggest the need for in-service teacher education programmes and joint efforts from individual teachers, school management, and government authorities catering to teachers’ ICT beliefs.

This study explores EFL teachers’ identity and emotion interaction across their career span from an integrative perspective. Based on the Dynamic System Model of Role Identity, qualitative interviews with three EFL teachers working in Chinese universities reveal a pattern of surviving, striving, and thriving career stages. Teachers develop from an enthusiastic companion frustrated with teacher-centered teaching, through an ambivalent motivator striving to be an expert teacher, to a fulfilled life coach. Action anchor, temporal dimension, and contextual mediation are discussed for the interplay between emotion and identity development. The study provides a more nuanced understanding of language teacher identity development.

As one of the two ‘educational special zones’ in China, Shanghai is launching a new round of curriculum reforms centring on lide shuren, viz. ‘fostering integrity and promoting rounded development of people’ (Hu 2012). Apart from piloting a new plan for Gaokao, the national college entrance examination in 2014, a ground-breaking endeavour by the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission was to establish 17 key research centres at higher institutions for 16 basic education subjects in an effort to push forward city-wide curriculum innovations through in-depth university-school collaborations. Founded in 2016, the Shanghai Centre for Research in English Language Education (SCRELE) is one of these key research platforms.

This article reports on a four-year-long ethnographic study on a curriculum innovation project introducing a weak form of communicative language teaching (CLT) at a Chinese secondary school. A total of ten teachers, who taught twelve project classes were observed across five stages of the project: the pre-project stage, the top-down stage, the bottom-up stage; the exam preparation stage, and the post-project stage, in an attempt to explore the changes that took place in the teacher's receptivity and classroom behaviors. Focusing on a focal informant (Marian, pseudonym), this paper illustrates how teacher cognition changed in accordance with the project goal and highlights how the trajectory of change was much more tangled and complicated than what was initially expected. Changes in the project teacher's teaching practices reflect the consistency between teacher cognition and classroom practices at the pre-project, the bottom-up and the post-project stages. In contrast, at the top-down and the exam stages of the innovation project, changes in teachers' cognition did not conform to changes in her classroom practices. These findings suggest the external pressure caused by top-down imperatives and high-stake exams might have caused the cognition-practices incongruence, which deserves language teacher educators' and administrators' further attention when promoting curriculum innovation.

Xiehouyu is a linguistic phenomenon unique to Chinese. A xiehouyu normally follows or precedes something said or some statement, which serves as the topic, and the saying is a kind of vehicle plus explanation about the topic. This study, based on a corpus of 1000 Chinese xiehouyus , PUCC (Peking University Chinese Corpus) and some questionnaire surveys, finds that xiehouyus differ from other types of metaphor or metonymies in that the explanation of a xiehouyu is always spelled out when first used, or used when addressing someone who the speaker supposes is not familiar with the phrase. This gives a xiehouyu the advantage of selecting anything that might bear some similarity or contiguity relationship to the discourse topic to trigger or comment on the topic. But paradoxically, in actual usage, either the antecedent or the consequent may sometimes be omitted, especially when the xiehouyu in case has been “entrenched” or is relatively familiar to the speaker or hearer. This indicates that either the antecedent or the consequent just serves as a trigger for a connection between the topic and vehicle or the ground. The study also finds that in some cases (about 30%), the selection of a vehicle in a xiehouyu is random, which suggests that in using a phrase like this, the speaker is more interested in creating a special (often humorous or comic) discourse effect than using the metaphor or metonymy to achieve a cognitive effect, thus the more interpersonal nature of certain types of metaphorical language.

In this paper we examine how English and Mandarin speakers think about time, and we test how the patterns of thinking in the two groups relate to patterns in linguistic and cultural experience. In Mandarin, vertical spatial metaphors are used more frequently to talk about time than they are in English; English relies primarily on horizontal terms. We present results from two tasks comparing English and Mandarin speakers' temporal reasoning. The tasks measure how people spatialize time in three-dimensional space, including the sagittal (front/back), transverse (left/right), and vertical (up/down) axes. Results of Experiment 1 show that people automatically create spatial representations in the course of temporal reasoning, and these implicit spatializations differ in accordance with patterns in language, even in a non-linguistic task. Both groups showed evidence of a left-to-right representation of time, in accordance with writing direction, but only Mandarin speakers showed a vertical top-to-bottom pattern for time (congruent with vertical spatiotemporal metaphors in Mandarin). Results of Experiment 2 confirm and extend these findings, showing that bilinguals' representations of time depend on both long-term and proximal aspects of language experience. Participants who were more proficient in Mandarin were more likely to arrange time vertically (an effect of previous language experience). Further, bilinguals were more likely to arrange time vertically when they were tested in Mandarin than when they were tested in English (an effect of immediate linguistic context).