This study examined the distribution of language expansion in parent-child (preschool aged) mealtime conversations in 30 Chinese middle-class families. The conversations were categorised into four types: "contextualised & conflicted," "contextualised & non-conflicted," "decontextualised & conflicted," and…

Anticipatory "it" pattern, which encodes interpersonal stance, plays a crucial role in academic writing. While previous studies have been explored the overuse and the underuse of this pattern among English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners and published writers, there has been limited exploration of how EFL learners use the…

The traditional discourse analysis focuses on the language analysis, but ignores the effect of non-language sources to the textual construction. At present, however, with the development of technology, pure discourses gradually decrease. There are other elements existing in the discourse more or less. The discourse analysis blending various…

Social networks have been investigated as an important factor to understand social and language innovations for decades. Most researchers focus on one-language-dominated societies when studying social networks' influence on language practice while studies on bilingual societies remain scarce. In this study, we examine how Chinese graduate students…

Teachers' online discussion text data shed light on their reflective thinking. With the growing scale of text data, the traditional way of manual coding, however, has been challenged. In order to process the large-scale unstructured text data, it is necessary to integrate the inductive content analysis method and educational data mining…

This study examines stance in cross-cultural media discourse by comparing disaster news reports on the Sichuan earthquake of May 2008 in a Chinese, an Australian Chinese, and an Australian newspaper. The stance taken in the news reports is examined using the Attitude sub-system of Martin and White's (2005) Appraisal framework. The analysis…

This article examines web comments written by Chinese learners on online open courses that are originally produced by leading universities in the United States and United Kingdom and are later introduced to China with Chinese translation. It applies the thematic discourse analysis strategy to classify the comments into themes to explore the…

This study investigated the use of discourse markers (DMs) by college learners of English in China. It compared the use of DMs for four discourse functions by students at different proficiency levels. An audio-video instrument called Video Oral Communication Instrument was conducted to elicit ratable speech samples. Fraser's (1999) taxonomy was…