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Contributing to existing studies on global circuits of knowledge and labour, this paper presents a case study of Andy – a Chinese doctoral student in the UK – and looks at his transition from higher education to later joining the labour market after returning to China through the lens of personality traits. It draws upon literature on language socialisation and sociolinguistic studies of mobility, focusing on how social actors navigate transnational higher education and the consequences on professional development in a neoliberalising market economy. It aims to investigate how (in)appropriate personhood – as manifested in recurrent personality attributes – is enacted and negotiated in specific learning contexts in Andy's trajectory and the impact on employability, with various types of data consisting of participant observation, interviews, and relevant materials. The analysis suggests that Andy has been trained to engage communicatively with academic tasks in higher education settings. However, Andy considers himself lacking certain personality variables that could align with the criteria of a "good doctoral student" depicted by the institutions, such as being independent, motivated, and self-disciplined. Andy gradually shows disorientation in an academic career, albeit finding his inadequacy to perform the desired professional personhood in a labour market that values working experience and communication skills over education certification. This process explains why sometimes the expected communicative repertories and training acquired in higher education are not transferable into valuable resources that Andy can mobilise to become employed. This paper argues that neoliberal rationality has stratifying effects on individuals primarily due to an emphasis on self-responsibility and constant improvements. In transnational higher education, certain personality traits are considered desirable and lacking such characteristics can have side effects on mobile actors like Andy, who navigate the globalising labour market through uncertainty and precarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The largest group of international students pursuing their overseas higher education in the UK come from China; and yet, little qualitative research has explored the experiences of Chinese students who have recently made this transition, with even less focusing on the experiences of both undergraduate and postgraduate students. The present article set out to explore the unique perspective of a small sample of first-year undergraduate and first-year postgraduate students (N = 18), on their experience of transitioning to a higher education institution in the UK. Semi-structured interviews were conducted, and thematic analysis was used to explore their experiences in greater depth. Two superordinate themes are reported here: "Education Dialogues and Scholarship" and "Intercultural Relations and Notions of Difference." The findings suggest that despite advances in institutional practices to support international students' transition to higher education in the UK, more work needs to be done to redress the sociocultural (and other) challenges that continue to exist for international Chinese students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a comparative study of thematic choice and progression in English and Chinese radio news texts, conducted within the systemic functional theory of Theme-Rheme () and the thematic progression model evolving from Daneš's work in the 1970s. It is suggested, following a detailed analysis of a corpus of sixty English and Chinese texts, that there are some similarities and disparities in structuring thematic information between the two languages. Overall, the key differences identified are that the English news tends to have a greater incidence of textual, and thus, multiple Themes, whereas the Chinese news tends to allow elliptical participants and circumstantial elements to be thematized more frequently. Such differences can be attributable to the distinctions in grammatical structure across the languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, based on the Appraisal System, investigates British journalists' different attitudes toward China and Vietnam in British news reports about the Dover migrant tragedy in 2000 and the Essex migrant tragedy in 2019. By analyzing affect resources in a newly built corpus with the help of UAM Corpus Tool 3.3, this study finds that more negative affect resources are used to portray China than those depicting Vietnam. British journalists manipulated emotions to emphasize that China, whether in 2000 or 2019, was a backward and underdeveloped country where citizens tried all means to escape to Britain. However, when British journalists found that the victims were Vietnamese instead of Chinese, they shifted attention to the pitiful Vietnamese families of the victims and tended to arouse readers' sympathy. The corpus findings highlight the ideological contradiction between Britain and China, reveal Britain's distrust of China's system, and suggest that the different comprehensive national powers of China and Vietnam have different impacts on Britain's international status, verifying that news discourse is permeated by ideology, politics, and economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on a study conducted on the benefits of using Wikis in English language education in China and Great Britain. Researchers have found that Web 2.0 tools, that include including Blogs, Facebook, Wikis, YouTube, and Podcasts, provide opportunities for students to discuss language learning materials through online resources; and also offer opportunities to communicate with people at large distances through the Internet.