As a linguistically heterogeneous nation, China has 290 languages and nearly 2000 distinct fangyans (dialects or subdialects) with Putonghua as the national language. These languages and language varieties are hierarchically ranked, based on their wider communicative and socioeconomic values. This paper reports on how Putonghua, fangyans, and English are perceived by a group of Chinese middle-class parents and how parents as agents of language policy provide affordances and constraints in facilitating or limiting their children’s language development in English, Putonghua and fangyans. The study involves eight Chinese city-dwelling families with children aged 5–11 years. By examining the children’s family language audits, observing their language/literacy practices, and engaging in conversation about parental language ideologies, the study aims to understand how public discourse about different languages or fangyans and their perceived values shape parental involvement in their children’s language development. The results of the study suggest that parents as agents of decision making have a strong influence on the changes of linguistic ecology in China in urban contexts.

Since 2001, Chinese–English bilingual education has been officially promoted in many universities in mainland China. It has, however, recently been criticised for not only failing to improve students’ English proficiency, but also impeding subject knowledge learning. Drawing on ethnographic data collected through classroom observations, interviews and fieldwork notes, this study examines the practices of bilingual education in an undergraduate Business Management Programme in one university. The study reveals that translanguaging is a prominent phenomenon in almost all subject courses in the programme. The translanguaging practices can be largely grouped into four categories: bilingual label quest, simultaneous code-mixing, cross-language recapping, and dual-language substantiation. The study further identifies supportiveness and freedom of context as two major forces that spurred the practices of translanguaging in the programme. The study concludes by arguing that an ideological reorientation towards flexible bilingualism is emerging in such BE contexts, which might be a favourable move away from the monolingual stereotype manifested in the traditional teaching-English-as-a-foreign-language and content-subject courses that envision English-medium instruction. A translanguaging perspective might give the current practices of BE due recognition.

This study explores how promotion is realized in applied linguistics (AL) research article introductions (RAIs). We focus on one promotional strategy, claiming centrality, and examine what appeals and linguistic devices applied linguists (ALs) employ and how they deploy them in RAIs to achieve positive evaluation of the significance of the topic or the research area. Fifty-one RAIs from three top-tier journals in AL were selected for a corpus-based study. Qualitative analyses of the texts revealed four major types of appeals, that is, appeals to salience, magnitude, topicality, and problematicity of the topic in either the research world or the real world, which ALs made in varied ways. Linguistic devices realizing these appeals were also analyzed with the tool of appraisal. Quantitative analyses further unveiled ALs' frequent use of appeals, their reliance on indirect over direct approaches to promotion, and their preferred patterns in appeal deployment. The pervasion of promotional elements is interpreted as indicative of academic marketization and as discipline-specific, and the indirect way of promotion is viewed as indicating a compromise between the need for promotion and the need to maintain objectivity.postprin

A recent interest in English Medium Instruction (EMI) has led to the flourishing of studies that examine motivation in EMI classrooms. Some of these studies tend to compare language learning motivation of students who are and are not enrolled in EMI programmes (see e.g. Doiz, Aintzane, David Lasagabaster & Juan Manuel Sierra. 2014. CLIL and motivation: The effect of individual and contextual variables. The Language Learning Journal 42(2). 209–224; Sylvén, Liss Kerstin & Amy S. Thompson. 2015. Language learning motivation and CLIL: Is there a connection? Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education 3(1). 28–50), showing that EMI learners are typically more motivated than their peers in non-EMI contexts. This has led to the common perception that learners enrol in EMI primarily to improve their English. Yet, there is a dearth of comprehensive studies exploring learners’ reasons behind their enrolment in EMI programmes and how these change throughout their studies. To address this gap, 247 university students from a range of universities across China filled in the questionnaire, which included scales pertaining to reasons for choosing an EMI programme. The data were analysed in SPSS. The results show that enhanced future job opportunities, opportunities for contact with an international community as well as potential gains in learning content and language specific vocabulary are the most strongly endorsed drivers that motivate EMI students to undertake their studies in English. They also tend to pursue their ideal visions of themselves as bilingual professionals and derive pleasure from EMI classes. To a lesser extent, students are motivated by what is expected of them and the actual pedagogy in the language classroom. Their motivation tends to stay stable over their years of study. However, the survey also revealed that not all students are equally motivated and resolved to continue with EMI studies. The findings highlight that, whereas students tend to be strongly motivated, there is a potential to improve the delivery of EMI courses.

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