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In the global competition of higher education, an increasing emphasis has been placed on university research excellence. Accordingly, academics have to engage in both research and teaching activities. The multiple and fragmented identities of academics can sometimes be contested, leading to identity tensions, and impeding their professional development. This raises the issue of how, and whether at all, academics integrate their professional identities in a culture of performativity. Against this backdrop, this qualitative study explored how a specific group of Chinese academics negotiate identity tensions as teachers and researchers through an emotional resilience lens. The narrative frames and interviews with 10 college English teachers yielded four types of identity negotiation in the continuum from identity conflicts to identity integration mediated by emotional resilience, including the disheartened performer, the miserable follower, the strenuous accommodator, and the fulfilled integrator. Emotional resilience as a mediator in professional identity tensions is discussed. Our findings offer a nuanced understanding of the complexity of academics developing an integrated professional identity. Policymakers should recognize the potential of emotional resilience in integrating academic professional identities and jointly support academics to cope with their identity tensions. However, if identity tensions are too complex for academics to solve, the policymakers should consider tensions as signals that the existing institutional policies may be counterproductive and need to be revised, rather than merely calling on academics' resilience.

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).

Traditionally, diminutives in Slavic languages have been primarily studied from the point of view of diminutive formation, often with special emphasis on the morphophonemic aspects, such as consonant mutation. In grammars of Slavic languages, diminutives are often dealt with in terms of listing different suffixes used in diminutive formation, but without analyzing the internal organization of the category, that is, without showing the correlation between its morphology and semantics. For Croatian, Babić (2002³) in his Word Formation in the Croatian Literary Language analyzes 37 suffixes used in diminutive formation, including their morphophonemic characteristics. This in itself is an indication of a high degree of complexity of diminutive derivatives. The focus of this paper will be noun diminutive formation in Croatian, which apart from covering 37 suffixes also implies their selective distribution over three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. In more recent approaches to diminutives in different languages, more and more attention has been paid to the semantic and pragmatic dimension (Wierzbicka 1980, 1984 ; Dressler and Merlini Barbaresi 1994). Jurafski (1996) views the diminutive category as a radial category, a structured polysemy that models the senses of the diminutive through metaphorical and inferential relations, while Taylor (1989:147) also sees diminutive morphemes as polysemous, claiming the meanings are linked through metaphor or metonymy. The shift to semantic and pragmatic considerations without a doubt sheds more light on the diminutive category. However, when one views a language such as Croatian, with its rich inventory of diminutive suffixes, the question arises whether the underlying semantic/pragmatic basis ties in not only with the complexity of interrelated senses, but also with the complexity of the diminutive derivations. Based on a representative corpus of noun diminutives, extracted from the Croatian National Corpus (over 2000 sentences), we will show how diminutives form a polysemous category in Croatian. This analysis will also show how the different suffixes cut across the meanings of the Croatian diminutives and, what is more, show consistent correlations within the category. In this way a coherent system becomes manifest and reduces what seems to be unfathomable complexity into a relatively well-ordered network. Interpreting diminutive morphology on the basis of semantics and pragmatics also provides insights into why some diminutive derivations are productive, and others are not.