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This study investigates the role of speaking the Jing language in the contemporary context of China's active engagement with Vietnam. Based on the fieldwork conducted in Dongxing Guangxi in January 2024, the study shows that the Jing language plays an important role in both maintaining the cultural heritage as pride and empowering the educational and employment trajectories as profit. More importantly, the capacity of speaking the Jing language can contribute to the social and medical communication between China and Vietnam. This can be manifested in terms of cultural communication with Vietnam and medical treatment for Vietnamese migrants. However, speaking the Jing language as pride is not always consistent with speaking the Jing language as profit. The internal differentiation within Vietnamese varieties may cause communication barriers for Jing speakers. The limited development of the Jing language also creates another layer of communication challenges for Jing people engaging in professional practices. How to mobilize the Jing language to facilitate the bilateral communication between China and Vietnam deserves our attention for future studies. The study has enriched the scope of the studies on language planning and policy in the borderlands. The study can shed lights on implementing language policy in China's border provinces and provide practical implications to facilitate the political and economic communication between China and other neighbouring countries for border prosperity and border stability.

This study examines the content strategies of 12 Chinese universities' international websites. Going beyond the Hofstede--Hall model, we explore a novel mixed-method study using both content strategy analysis and user research to investigate intercultural web-based communication strategies. Our study identifies the impacts of Chinese cultural and socio-political values on web content and the mismatch between such values and the information needs of globally distributed prospective students. We conclude that universities' web content strategies should fully understand target audiences' needs. Designers benefit from doing stakeholder interviews and competitor analysis to provide relevant, accurate, and accessible information to users from different cultures.

In Chinese culture the concept of 'face' refers to the "dignity" or "prestige" of an individual that must be protected or saved, particularly in inter-cultural communication. This study aimed to examine how addressers inevitably save their own face in inter-cultural communication and what different strategies of 'face' saving have a bearing on their linguistic behaviors. A mixed method research design, in two stages was conducted wherein a questionnaire was utilized in the first stage (quantitative) and a semi-structured interview in the second stage (qualitative). The questionnaire examined the situations of saving the addresser's face while the interview examined the strategies of saving addresser's face. The sample comprised 120 business persons for the quantitative phase, and 15 randomly selected from the 120 respondents for the interview. The findings show that when addressers' face is hurt or threatened, such as when they report their mistakes and are refused, they will apply face saving strategies including apology, admitting, finding excuses and justification, and pretending nothing severe and showing they can handle the problem. It was also found that Chinese businesspersons can protect self-face when they report their mistakes and poor performance to their superiors, peers, and subordinates in intercultural communication. These findings can guide people from other countries to better understand Chinese businesspersons' communication processes and their smooth and effective intercultural communication.

Sociocultural perspectives of learning emphasise the role of social interaction and activity in the process of knowledge construction and foreground the social-cultural settings in which knowledge construction occurs. This paper examines how in-service language teachers co-construct technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) in asynchronous discussion and explores two significant areas: 1) the critical elements of TPACK and 2) the process and strategies of knowledge construction. As such, the focus of the paper is placed on the type of knowledge that is considered significant by language teachers and the process of knowledge construction, with attention to the communicative strategies and resources. Online chats from 13 teachers are analysed using both thematic and sociocultural discourse analysis. The results indicate that TPACK mainly concerns the affordances of technology and methods to integrate technology from teachers' perspectives. In the process of co-constructing TPACK, teachers use different communicative strategies to negotiate meaning and achieve mutual understanding. Various contextual resources are exploited to facilitate and mediate the process of knowledge construction. This paper highlights the significance of context in developing knowledge, the need for providing participants with training for communicative strategies, establishing ground rules in collaborative work, giving ownership of task or topic to the participants and the importance of social talk.

This study explores the status quo of speaking strategies used by Chinese High School Students of International Department by using both questionnaire and interview. The participants were 90 second-year Chinese High School Students of International Department, and then the data were analyzed by SPSS 18.0. The study yields certain results. First, Chinese High School Students of International Department employ English speaking strategies at a medium level in general. Second, there are differences between higher achievers and lower achievers in the use of speaking strategies. Third, students' use of speaking strategies is significantly correlated with students' English proficiency. Pedagogical implications for teachers and students are discussed in the end.

With the booming of Chinese internet corporations, various wrongdoings have been frequently exposed to the public, which damages their corporate image. To face the challenge, these companies usually resort to apologies for image restoration. This study investigates how apology strategies are employed by Chinese internet corporations to restore image in the event of wrongdoings. Based on a self-built corpus and by means of textual analysis, we identified different apology strategies characterized by various linguistic features. The results show that "Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices (IFIDs)" and "damage repair" are two of the most frequently used move types which are normally marked by such key linguistic features as personal pronouns, modal verbs, performative verbs and intensifiers. It is also found that IFIDs, "giving account" and "admitting mistakes", "offering repair" and "inviting further interaction" are often incorporated together to show the company's sincere apologetic stance which contributes to the ultimate goal -- rebuilding corporate image and regaining the public's trust. However, direct expressions of "asking for forgiveness" are seldom found in apologies crafted by Chinese internet corporations. This study on apologies in the domain of internet corporations is believed to shed light on research on corporate apology in particular and corporate image restoration in general.

The study aims to examine how higher education institutions (HEIs) in three countries responded to the challenges of COVID-19 over a six-month period at the outbreak of the global pandemic. Employing document analysis, we examined 732 publicly available communications from 27 HEIs in Canada, China, and the USA. Through theoretical frameworks of crisis management and Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT), we explore how HEIs respond to the pandemic and protect campus stakeholders. The study revealed common patterns in communication strategies during different stages of the pandemic that include accepting responsibility, emotional reassurance, and compensating victims. It also revealed key differences across social contexts and environments and distinct leadership styles. Findings offer insight into how HEIs communicated at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic and inform the application of SCCT and crisis management theory to institutional behavior in the context of prolonged and intersecting disasters.

Foreign language teaching highlights the cultivation of the learners' communicative competence, because the main purpose of learning a foreign language is to use the target language to communicate. However, many students in higher institutions in China cannot speak English fluently after having learned English for more than ten years, although they have mastered abundant knowledge of grammars and enough vocabulary, which mainly results from lack of interaction in classroom teaching besides the natural language environment. Classroom interaction is the key to effective teaching in EFL classroom. So, using strategies to promote the interaction in class is necessary. This paper explores the interaction between teacher and student in EFL classroom from the perspective of Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT). Data was collected from 540 minute video samples of three English teachers' classroom teaching. This study aimed: 1) To identify whether the teachers use communication accommodation strategies to develop the interaction when they are faced with the difficulties in EFL class; 2) To answer which strategies are often used in EFL classroom? Findings showed: 1) Communication accommodation strategies happened in Teacher-student interaction; 2) Communication accommodation strategies such as approximation, interpret ability, emotional expression and interpersonal control are the basic strategies which were employed by the three participants in each session of EFL class; 3) Interpret ability and strategy of discourse management such as face-maintenance, turn-taking, topic control, asking referential questions, conversational repair and feedback occurred frequently according to the discourse; 4) The more accommodation strategies the teacher used, the better the interaction in the classroom was.

The presence of Africans in China has been phenomenal since the late 1990s. In recent years, there has been a dramatic uptick in people from Africa coming to the major cities of China such as Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macau, Yiwu, Shanghai, and Beijing. They are in the process of building linguistic, cultural, and economic bridges between their source communities and their host communities. In this process, communication problems are inevitable, since Africans and Chinese do not share a common lingua franca in most cases. However, these communities have succeeded in devising some interactive strategies that turn out to be quite effective, especially in market situations, one of them being "calculator communication" (CM). This paper looks at these strategies in the context of contact linguistics and the emergence of some hybrid language that has elements of African languages, Chinese, and English.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way young children engage in peer communication. The aim of this study was to explore how young children engaged in peer interaction remotely by examining young children's multimodal interactions during the pandemic. Visual and audio data posted to Douyin (China's most popular live-streaming site) between January 23, 2020 and May 6, 2020 were collected and analyzed. Mediated discourse analysis was used to explore young children's remote interactions as captured on video recordings. Results support the critical role of play materials and tangible tools in mediating young children's peer interactions and participation in remote environments.

Based on four maxims of Grice's cooperative principle framework, a small-scale study is conducted to examine the communication strategies employed by experienced ground service staff. Data have been collected from questionnaires and in-depth interviews with Chinese domestic airlines' ground staff. This study identifies that the communicative challenges usually happen in service failure and service recovery. And it finds out violation of four maxims of Grice's cooperative principle is taken as sub-strategies of overinformativeness, telling a white lie, irrelevance, and ambiguity or prolixity. These strategies lead to overcommunication which could be routinely employed for the specific professional purposes of saving the passenger's face, gaining the passenger's understanding, reducing conflicts, avoiding complaints, or even establishing a harmonious relationship with passengers. This study moreover exploits that in the ground service communication context, two salient reasons stimulate the overcommunication strategies. Firstly it is to improve the service quality and secondly to enhance the passenger's satisfaction which are the determining factors to the sustainable development of the airlines. This study is ambitious to seek a new means of understanding and investigating the ground service communication from the perspective of pragmatics. By integrating business communication in ESP context to the classical theory of pragmatics, this study attempts to offer practical suggestions to the frontline communicators.

As an interactional encounter between a journalist and one or more newsworthy public figures, an interview program is a special type of discourse that is full of evaluative language. This paper sets out to explore evaluation in interview programs from the perspective of appraisal system. The corpus software used in this study is UAM CorpusTool 3.3--annotating software that is able to automatically annotate the grammatical structure and parts of speech of the text, meanwhile allows manual annotation of linguistic features based on various schemes. The results show that the use of attitudinal resources is closely related to speaker's communication strategies. Invoked evaluation and positive appraisal resources are most frequently used in the interview to establish alignment with the audience. As will be explained below, the design of the program process and other information are also sources of evaluation.

The computer-based College English Test-Spoken English Test (CET-SET) in China incorporates interactional competence in its construct by using a non-face-to-face paired discussion task. To build validity arguments for this unique computer-mediated interactive task, the present study investigated the impact of delivery mode on test performance in terms of communication strategy use. Data were collected from 60 test-takers who sat both the computer-based CET-SET and its face-to-face equivalent. Through an analysis of test-taker discourse combined with post-test test-taker interviews, the study examined their use of strategies in the discussion task under each mode. The findings of the study provided empirical evidence for the comparability of the two modes. Some differences, however, emerged in the use of interaction strategies, which were primarily attributed to the presence/absence of the visual elements of oral interaction. Hence, suggestions were made to address the issues concerning the computer-delivered mode.

The development of students' professional skills is an important issue in higher education in China. This research reports a 3-month study investigating engineering students' communication strategies (CSs) while they were interacting to do a 12-week mobile-assisted learning project, i.e., "Organizing and Attending a Model International Conference". This learning project was a major teaching module of the English course of Professional Applications, which used a blended teaching mode integrating face-to-face instruction and mobile learning. Sixty-seven students volunteered to participate in the study. The instruments included eight oral communication sessions, a questionnaire, stimulated recall interviews, the participants' WeChat exchanges, etc. Results showed that the participants used a variety of CSs when completing the academic learning project. Moreover, these CSs were closely related to the students' involvement in social interaction. Future research should focus on a longitudinal investigation of the amount of scaffolding that helps students transfer their communication strategies across tasks.

This study sets out to explore Chinese adolescents' subjectivities toward the use of mobile phones, and reveal the dynamic relationship among students, parents, and school concerning mobile phone usage in rural China. Twenty-one high school students were recruited, and asked to draw a painting that expresses their perceptions of mobile phones in relation to family and school life. After analyzing the thematic drawings and their self-explanations upon the drawings, several themes arise: the mobile phone as a bridge of love, as an extension of the home, as an iron cage, as the blasting fuse of family conflicts, and as a threat to school life. Contrary to popular belief that adolescents are digital natives who were immersed in mobile technologies since birth, this study suggests that digital culture divides based on social-economic status and the concept of digital natives should be used with caution when analyzing teenagers' mobile culture in rural China.

It is generally accepted that learning belief has great effect on learning, however, few studies examine the extent to which learning belief affects related achievement. This paper mainly discusses the study of relationship between learning belief and English achievement of Chinese English major students in College. Through the data analysis of Horwitz's BALLI and TEM4 scores, we tested on 100 English major students in college, which was focused on the correlation between learning belief and learning achievements. Based on this, a further study was made on influencing factors such as student's personality, learning motivation, aptitude, teachers and learning participators on students' English learning belief and achievements. The results show that the relation between learning belief has a general positive effect on learning achievement, but not determinative; personality plays important role in learning belief; aptitude and hard work are able to produce high scores; good achievement students are driven by both integrative and instrumental motivation, teachers and the classmates have mutual influence on learning achievement. The study is very important as it provides implications for college English language teaching and further help to improve students' English proficiency.

Along with the significant improvement of Chinese universities' visibility in the global higher education field, the Chinese government has been actively branding "Study in China" in recent years to market itself as a prevalent destination for international education. International enrolment has gained increasing importance and become a key component of the internationalisation discourse in China. Borrowing the theories of field and capital, this study aims to obtain a more nuanced understanding of China's position as a leading host country for international students. Using a multiple-case study design, this study investigates the motivations for selected flagship universities in China to campaign to recruit international students, and in what way these are nested with the national priorities, as well as the key recruitment strategies and technologies they have employed. The findings help reveal the distinctiveness of the Chinese model of international student recruitment. A shift in priorities is also noted as well as controversies and tensions in respect to the employment of various recruitment strategies. The lessons of leading universities in China offer insights both for researchers and policymakers in many countries to rethink their strategies to increase their nations and universities' presence in the global landscape.

This study employs corpus analytical tools to carry out a systematic study on Chinese Science and Engineering Majors' (SEMs') use of self-repair in their oral English. The study aims to find out the overall feature of using self-repair by SEMs and to see if there exists statistically significant difference of using self-repair across different English proficiency level groups. Results show that SEMs use self-repair frequently and they use same information repair (SIR) most. There is no statistically significant difference in the overall frequency of using self-repair among SEMs' levels. SEMs' correction rate is rather low. Self-monitor theory and communication strategies theory are used to explain the results. At the end of the thesis, the author provides some suggestions for oral English teaching

This paper investigated the current situation of oral English teaching, learning, and assessment at the tertiary level in China through needs analysis and explored the implications for the development of a diagnostic speaking test. Through random sampling, the researcher administered both a student questionnaire and a teacher questionnaire to over 200 students and 30 teachers respectively. Results revealed that students regarded the use of communicative strategies, range of vocabulary and fluency as the most difficult things in their oral English learning. Results also demonstrated that the majority of college English teachers paid much attention to oral English teaching. However, most college English teachers seldom administered classroom oral assessment, and their practices of classroom oral assessment were considered as lack of systematic and standardized procedures. Implications for further improvement in oral English teaching and assessment were also discussed.

Based on a corpus of 296 authentic business emails produced in computer-mediated business communication from 7 Chinese international trade enterprises, this paper addresses the language strategy applied in CMC (Computer-mediated Communication) by examining the use of hedges. With the emergence of internet, a wider range of hedges are applied extensively in four types of business emails: marketing email, inquiry email, quotation email, follow-up email. Marketing emails have the most hedges while follow-up emails, quotation emails have the least, and inquiry emails in between. As plausible shields, modal verbs are massively adopted in four types of business emails to show politeness and eagerness for business partnership. Marketing emails employ adaptors and rounders to soften the exaggerated expressions in the introduction to the company and its products so as to make a convincing promotion. Both inquiry emails and quotation emails use adaptors and rounders very often when figures concerning products and prices are deliberately offered in a modest way for further negotiation. Follow-up emails use rounders, adaptors and attribute shield extensively in negotiating and reaching agreement. The three types of hedges help both parties to reduce risk and defend themselves against claims with tactic language strategy. The use of hedges in business emails demonstrates the flexibility of business communication with the help of IT technology. The rules of accurate expressions in business letters are no longer strictly observed in computer-mediated communication. The breakthrough of extensive hedge using in business emails showcases a change in business communication manners mediated by IT technology.

This study was intended to explore the relationship of gender, perceived language ability with communication strategy use by tourism-oriented EFL learners studying at the universities in the Southwest China to improve and maintain their oral communication in English. The Communication Strategy Questionnaire was used for data collection, and the quantitative method such as Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and Chi-square tests were employed for data analysis. The results demonstrated that although the gender and perceived language ability had minor relationship with students' overall use of communication strategy, the gender and the perceived language ability showed their significant variations in the students' choice of individual communication strategies.

China has become an exporter of material goods to the world, particularly to the United States. It is time for the exploration of a mutually beneficial relationship in a strikingly different realm, that of human capital in higher education and its contributions to the quality of university teaching. To faculty members and students at U.S. universities the human face of this relationship is Chinese international teaching assistants (ITAs) who are graduate students in science and math, and who are also being supported as teachers of basic undergraduate courses within their academic disciplines. Chinese ITAs are the largest single group of international graduate students, and they make American undergraduate education possible in chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, business, and computer science. The quality of the performance of native English speaking and non-native English speaking TAs has an impact on the learning of U.S. undergraduates, and while many in American universities praise Chinese ITAs' high levels of knowledge within their areas of study, less praiseworthy are their English communication skills. For a variety of reasons many young Chinese scholars arrive in the U.S. not able to function as content teachers who have to operate in English, and a salient feature of this inability to use English to communicate is Chinese ITAs' lack of experience with suprasegmental aspects of English pronunciation such as Discourse Intonation (DI), which is used to emphasize and differentiate ideas, begin and end topics, and express social relationships in spoken utterances. Yet English as a Foreign Language education (EFL) in China does not deal with suprasegmental aspects of English pronunciation, nor really with spoken intelligibility at all. This proposal describes an initial step in a three-year agenda for improving the current exchange of human capital and knowledge in higher education between China and the U.S., and, ostensibly, other countries in which young Chinese scientists seek advanced degrees, and in which English is the medium of instruction and communication. In essence, greater mutual communication and curricular exchange between American and Chinese institutions of higher education is needed. There needs to be a shift in who Chinese universities see as stakeholders for their EFL program outcomes. One possible mechanism would be a mutually developed course, "Using English to Teach Labs and Classes in U.S. Universities," to be developed and taught in China to late-career undergraduates who intend to pursue graduate study in the U.S. Two established research and science institutions will be focused on, one in the U.S. and one in China. As the initial step, one ITA educator and materials development specialist from the U.S. university will visit the Chinese university for a five month period. This report creates a context and outlines the agenda for this working visit, and for the development of the course. (Contains 7 tables and 2 figures.)

This paper explores the gender effect on the use of communication strategies (CSs). The study collected the data of 36 Chinese EFL learners when they fulfilled communicative tasks as the basis for analysis. The statistical results show that no sex-related significant, direct effect was identified on the frequency and types of CS use, but the sex variable affects the effectiveness of females' and males' use of CSs. Those findings bring some implications for foreign language teaching and learning.

This study was designed to examine the reported and observed communication strategies used by Chinese English-as-an-additional-language (EAL) graduate students in electrical engineering and education in performing informal debate tasks. The strategies were elicited through strategy inventories, post-task strategy recalls, and task performances. The results revealed eight categories of communication strategies, with fluency-oriented strategies used most frequently and translation least frequently. Differences in using communication strategies were also found between advanced and high-intermediate learners, while the use of one individual strategy--clarifying stance--also notably differed between the two disciplines. Overall, results from nonparametric tests revealed significant positive relationships between certain categories of communication strategy use and learners' speaking performance. The findings and their implications are discussed both to inform practice and to encourage further research about the communication strategies used by EAL learners who are graduate students.

Although there has been a steady rise of empirical studies investigating pragmatic strategies in oral communication using English as a lingua franca (ELF), there have been relatively few published studies about pragmatic strategies in written ELF communication. Email, despite its current popularity, has scarcely been examined in ELF communication. To extend the existing research on ELF into email discourse, this study investigates Chinese-English bilingual professionals' real-life emails in ELF communication. Email data were collected from 15 Chinese-English bilingual professionals in Mainland China. The paper analyzes and discusses the pragmatic strategies employed by these Chinese bilingual professionals both to solve and to avoid problems of understanding when writing their emails in ELF communication. The results reveal no evidence of non-understanding and only a few misunderstandings. The Chinese bilingual professionals employed various pragmatic strategies to prevent and resolve problems of understanding in ELF communication and to facilitate understanding and ensure communicative effectiveness.

This article reports an undergraduate software engineering project in which, over a period of 2 years, four student teams from different cohorts developed a note-taking app for four academic clients at the students' own university. We investigated how projects involving internal clients can give students the benefits of engaging in real software development while also giving them experience of a student-staff collaboration that has its own benefits for students, academics, and the university more broadly. As the university involved is a Sino-Foreign university located in China, where most students are Chinese and most teaching staff are not, this 'student as co-producer' approach interacts with another feature of the project: cultural distance. Based on analysis of notes, reports, interviews, and focus groups, we recommend that students should be provided with communicative strategies for dealing with academics as clients; universities should develop policies on ownership of student-staff collaborations; and projects should include a formalised handover process. This article can serve as guidance for educators considering a 'students as co-producers' approach for software development projects.

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.

This article is a personal view of the application of results from three areas of research that I believe are relevant to developing second language speaking in the classroom: task repetition, pre-task planning and communication strategies. I will discuss these three areas in terms of level of research application--where research is not applied well (task repetition), where it is reasonably well applied (pre-task planning), and where it may have been over-applied (communication strategies). For each area I briefly review the relevant research to highlight how teachers can potentially apply the research findings to scaffold learning processes in speaking. I will also suggest how much of the research is getting through to teachers and being taken up in day-to-day teaching of English. I draw mainly on my own extensive experience as a teacher educator for over 20 years working with pre-service English teachers of bilingual students in Singapore schools and in-service teachers attending professional development courses or pursuing Master's degree studies, as well as college English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers from the People's Republic of China receiving postgraduate teaching certification in English language teaching (ELT) and higher degree qualifications in my university each year. I will also include some observations about classroom practice based on a survey of selected course books.

Hematology is difficult for students to learn. A beneficial education method for hematology clerkship training is required to help students develop clinical skills. Foreign medical students often encounter communication issues in China. To address this issue, Chinese post-graduates from our institute are willing to assist with educating foreign students. Therefore, we propose a mixed team-based learning method (MTBL) which might overcome communication problems in hematology clerkship. Twenty-two foreign medical Students attended a 2-week hematology clerkship in Fujian Medical University Union Hospital. Twenty-one foreign African medical students were assigned randomly into two groups. Fourteen foreign African medical students were assigned to MTBL group. Each MTBL team included two foreign African medical students and one Chinese post-graduate. Seven foreign African medical students were assigned to lecture-based learning method (LBL) group, which had a foreign medical classmate from Hong Kong or Chinese intern volunteers to serve as translators. The practice test scores of MTBL were significantly higher than LBL group (p < 0.05). The MTBL group had increased motivation to prepare before class, an engaged classroom atmosphere, and an improvement in their understanding of difficult topics. Interestingly, the Chinese post-graduates also benefited from this setting, as they found that this interaction improved their communication in the English language. The mixed team-based learning method overcomes communication problems in hematology clerkship. Foreign medical students and Chinese post-graduates alike can benefit from MTBL.

Chinese students are now the largest group of international students in the Australian higher education sector. The patterns of Chinese communication and education affect the ways that Chinese students engage with their lecturers and manage their learning relationships. A case study of these patterns provides a small window through which to observe the progress of higher education internationalisation in Australia. In this study, the experiences of seven Chinese students in a multicultural educational context are explored, with a focus on their communication practices and relationships with their lecturers in Australia. This paper contributes to understandings of how student-teacher communication practices affect learning experiences for Chinese students in Australian or other international universities.

It has become increasingly recognized that what teachers and students value affect teaching and learning in general and in the area of mathematics in particular. Yet, the extent to which this is so varies across cultural regions. In recent years, how the ethnic Chinese teach and learn mathematics has attracted much attention worldwide. It is precisely the purpose of the present study to investigate the value structures of three Chinese regions. Using a recently developed and validated questionnaire, students' values in mathematics learning in the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan are delineated. In the first place, the results reveal that there are six dimensions in the students' value structure, namely "achievement," "relevance," "practice," "communication," "information and communications technology" as well as "feedback." However, in each of the six value components derived from the principal components analysis, statistically significant differences between the regions were found.

This study examined how mentoring initiation and maintenance strategies mediate the relationship between acculturative stress and intercultural communication competence on Chinese graduate students' program satisfaction. Results supported a partial mediation effect for mentoring maintenance strategies. By specifying the mediating effect, the model explained significantly more variance in program satisfaction beyond the direct effects of the intercultural variables. We extended one premise of mentor enactment theory to a cross-cultural context by investigating the unique roles of expressing appreciation and communicating personal goals as effective maintenance strategies in predicting Chinese international graduate students' satisfaction. Practical implications are also discussed.

The present study aims to investigate Chinese English learners' ability to use communication strategies (CSs). The subjects are put in a relatively real English referential communication setting and the analyses of the research data show that Chinese English learners, when encountering problems in foreign language (FL) communication, are characterized by the frequent use of substitution, approximation, circumlocution, literal translation, exemplification, word-coinage, repetition, and the infrequent use of cultural-knowledge and paralinguistic CSs. The rare use of paralinguistic strategies is found to be typical of Chinese English learners. The high frequency of literal translation, one first language (L1)-based strategy in our study sample, suggests that FL learners' use of L1-based CSs may depend more upon the developmental stage of their target language than the typology distance between L1 and the target language. The frequency of repetition reveals one fact that the Chinese English learners lack variety and flexibility in their use of CSs. Based on these findings, it was indicated that learners' use of CSs is influenced by a variety of factors, among which the development stage of their interlanguage and their cultural background are identified as two important factors. Some implications are finally suggested for the English foreign language teaching practice in China.

The current study focused on an important issue pertaining to online social communication by investigating perceptional differences between eastern and western adolescents. A total of 309 participants were recruited from three countries: China, Singapore, and the United States. Significant differences were found between eastern and western adolescents in terms of their perceptions in online social networking and communication. The study has generated important findings that help understand the dynamics of online social communication for adolescents, especially for online social communication that involves global communities.

The past two decades have witnessed increasing global acceptance of the important role that capable leadership plays in education reform and school improvement. Consequently, policymakers internationally have actively sought means of strengthening capacity for school-level leadership, with a particular focus on the design of more effective programmes of administrator preparation and development. In this article we examine trends in the design of graduate education programmes offered in the related domains of business management and publication administration. We analyse data extracted from on-line descriptions of three types of master's degree programmes: master of business administration (MBA); master of public administration (MPA); and MBA programmes with a concentration in education (MBA-Ed). The study identifies patterns in the programme structure, curriculum content and learning methods employed in these graduate management programmes. The analysis yields features that could add potential value to university-based master of education degree programmes aimed at principal preparation. (Contains 2 tables and 4 notes.)

Interaction in English as an International Language (EIL) setting provides myriad opportunities for negotiation of meaning, arguably beneficial for language acquisition. The present study aims at finding out how meaning is negotiated in EIL interaction among two groups of postgraduate TESOL international students from two Asian countries, Indonesia and People's Republic of China (PR China). The findings reveal that the students indeed utilized various strategies such as clarification requests, confirmation checks, comprehension checks, word-coinage, and use of approximation, self-repetition, other repetition, self-correction, and non-verbal expression of non-understanding. The relative frequency of strategies used appears to have been influenced by the interaction tasks. The variation of strategies across the three pairs is relatively similar. Some EIL features corresponding to pronunciation and grammatical structures also emerge in the present study. Finally, the study suggests that negotiation strategies need to be included in the English teaching syllabus. Moreover, current foreign or second language teaching methodology needs to pay serious attention to EIL features and to develop learners' intelligibility and communication strategies by making them aware of standard varieties of English.

The "twisted cyber spy" affair began in 2010, when Google was attacked by Chinese cyber-warriors charged with stealing Google's intellectual property, planting viruses in its computers, and hacking the accounts of Chinese human rights activists. In the ensuing international embroglio, the US mainstream press, corporate leaders, and White House deployed what I call the rhetoric of belligerent humanitarianism to try to shame the Chinese while making a case for global free markets, unfettered speech, and emerging democracy. That rhetorical strategy carries heavy baggage, however, as it tends to insult the international community, exalt neo-liberal capitalism, sound paternalistic, and feel missionary. Belligerent humanitarianism sounds prudent, however, when compared to the rhetorical strategy of the US military-industrial complex, which marshals the rhetoric of warhawk hysteria to escalate threats into crises and political questions into armed inevitabilities. To counter these two rhetorical strategies, this essay argues that China's leaders deploy the rhetoric of traumatized nationalism, wherein they merge a biting sense of imperial victimage, Maoist tropes of heroism, and a new-found sense of market mastery to portray the US as a tottering land of hypocrisy and China as the rising hope for a new world order. The "Twisted Cyber Spy" affair therefore offers a case study of US-Chinese communication in an age of globalization. (Contains 34 notes.)

Graphic design's messages can reach across streets and across the globe; they can bring together countries, communities and strangers for a common cause; they can also serve to divide otherwise amenable neighbors. Design students must fully understand this potential reach and thus the responsibility they have to create tolerant, informed messages. The need to understand how personal beliefs of race, religion, socio-economic class and other differences influence visual messages is an ethical component of the graphic designer's professional duties. For if these differences and the potentially skewed perspectives are not recognized, then slippage between accurate and faulty messages will seep into graphic compositions. Sticks + Stones deliberately composes a highly diverse "classroom" of students in an effort for students to learn from each other as well as the curriculum. Studies show that students who learn in a diverse curriculum not only gain a broader perspective and appreciation for other cultures, but they also develop better thinking skills. Sticks + Stones collaborators aim to propagate knowledgeable, culture-savvy future designers who have learned first-hand from an extraordinarily diverse group of peers about the insulting and potentially harmful effects of image misuse. The innovative curriculum requires ethnic profiling and stereotyping as well as reflection, conversation and collaborative design on the way to multicultural understanding. (Contains 2 figures and 5 resources.)

China's digital public diplomacy on social media and the ways in which Chinese diplomats communicate have received international attention and generated academic interest. As the first study to conduct country-specific investigation on how Chinese diplomats in Germany practice digital public diplomacy on Twitter, this article examines their communication strategies based on Twitter data collected from verified accounts of Chinese diplomats in Germany during the part of the pandemic from January 2020 to February 2021. The study also identifies discrepancies between the actual practices of China's Twitter diplomacy in Germany and media perception of China's Twitter diplomacy represented by relevant news articles from two German mainstream newspapers, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Süddeutsche Zeitung in 2020. The discrepancies, the author claims, can be attributed to the process of othering China, i.e. framing China as the other, that eventually compromises the effectiveness of China's communication strategies. Seeing China's Twitter diplomacy as network-centric public diplomacy with Chinese characteristics, this article depicts the ways in which the case of Germany contributes to the understanding of the global communication network of China's public diplomacy on Twitter by showing its country-specific communication strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing focus on exploring dyadic interactions and outcomes between couples undergoing cervical cancer (CC). The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to figure out how dyadic communication influences both CC patients' and spouses' coping abilities. A sample of 286 CC dyads completed questionnaires assessing dyadic communication and dyadic coping. The actor-partner interdependence model was used to analyze the interaction effect between the dyads. Dyadic communication among cervical cancer (CC) patients has a predictive effect on their own negative dyadic coping (β = − 0.141, P = 0.034) and on their spouses' delegated dyadic coping (β = 0.133, P = 0.044). In contrast, dyadic communication among CC spouses is negatively associated with their own supportive dyadic coping (β = − 0.237, P < 0.001), delegated dyadic coping (β = − 0.156, P = 0.018), common dyadic coping (β = − 0.148, P = 0.026) and also with CC patients' supportive dyadic coping (β = − 0.153, P = 0.022). Dyadic communication between CC patients and their spouses affect their own and each other's dyadic coping. Exploring interventions focused on the CC couples' communication strategies to enhance their positive dyadic coping should be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western crisis communication theories focusing on individual attribution and stable underlying norms fail to account for crises embedded in larger social problems that lead to regulatory changes. By analysing three cases that Chinese crisis managers initially identified as "commission", "control" and "agreement" situations (Bradford & Garrett, 1995) but ended up as crises involving "absent standards", "bad standards" and "overrated standards", in which the first two resulted in normative changes, we highlight the deliberative potential of crisis communication embodied in the "standards situation". When neither journalistic narratives portraying the accused as a "villain" nor organizational accounts foregrounding a "victim/scapegoat" self-perception can contain attribution at individual levels, the society enters a deliberative mode that interrogates actors' collective guilt complicit in a crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research report measures changes in China's public diplomacy after a May 2021 collective study session of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo. The session examined the country's global communications strategy and fuelled speculation about what might change in China's external communications, particularly with regard to its "wolf warrior" diplomats. Combining hand-coding and quantitative text analysis, we develop and validate a measure of "wolf warrior diplomacy" rhetoric and apply it to over 200,000 tweets from nearly 200 institutional, media and diplomatic Twitter accounts. Using a difference-in-difference research design, we evaluate if the session led to a noticeable change in the tweets of diplomats based in OECD countries. After the announcement, PRC diplomats in the OECD moderated their tweets in comparison to non-OECD diplomats, but we do not detect a major re-orientation of PRC communication strategies. These findings have relevance for scholars of Chinese foreign policy, nationalism and public diplomacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The aim of this study was to examine the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak and the international communication management of Chinese diplomats as a case for extending the definition of intermestic public diplomacy. The goal was to reveal how Beijing subtly used both domestic and foreign social media to organize a network for communication about COVID-19 and purposefully soften the highly centralized and hierarchical political propaganda of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Design/methodology/approach: Based on the literature on digital public diplomacy, the authors applied the existing concept of intermestic to Chinese politics in order to demonstrate the digitalization of public diplomacy, along with its forms and strategies under an authoritarian regime. A hybrid methodology combining quantitative network analysis and qualitative discourse analysis permits examination of China's intermestic online communication network dynamics, shedding light on how such an intermestic practice promoted Chinese values and power to international publics in the early stages of the COVID-19 crisis. Findings: The authors' findings extend the implications of intermestic public diplomacy from a democratic context to an authoritarian one. By analyzing the content of public diplomacy and para-diplomatic social media accounts in China and abroad at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, the authors outlined China's early crisis management, explaining its intermestic public diplomacy transmission modes and strategies. Moreover, the authors identified changes in the narrative strategies of Chinese diplomats and journalists during this process. Social implications: The findings of this study underline that Beijing established a narrative-making virtual communication structure for disseminating favorable Chinese strategic narratives and voices through differentiated communication on domestic and foreign social media platforms. Such intermestic communication strategies were particularly evident and even further weaponized by Beijing in its large-scale Wolf Warrior diplomacy in the spring of 2020. Thus, the study's findings help readers understand how China digitalized its public diplomacy, its digital communication patterns and strategies. Originality/value: On the one hand, geopolitical uncertainty and the popularity of social media have contributed to the evolution of the intermestic model of public diplomacy. This model allows actors to coordinate homogenous and differentiated communication practices to deploy their influence. On the other hand, the authors did not examine how intermestic audiences perceive and receive public diplomacy practices. In future studies, scholars should measure the agenda-setting capacity of diplomatic actors by examining the effects of such intermestic communication efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study assesses the impact of China's mediated communication strategies implemented in Latin America from 2013 to 2021. We content-analyzed the press coverage about China in nine countries and unveiled tones, topics, and frames which were then examined further across different sources. Public sentiments toward China were gauged to infer a potential link to China's communication efforts. Overall, China's program to influence Latin American media outlets and public opinion has not resulted in substantial gains; the region's sentiment toward China actually deteriorated. There is a communication gap between Chinese and Latin American publics, which is inimical to public diplomacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]