Purpose: While higher education has been encouraging interdisciplinary research, few studies have been conducted to understand how interdisciplinarity shapes the identity construction of scholars, especially doctoral students who may already strive to socialize into academia. Design/methodology/approach: Therefore, this study adopts the approach…

Writing ability is an essential skill for college students to improve their school performance and complete their academic writing tasks. Proficient English writing skills are also highly advantageous for their future career prospects and personal growth. However, many English learners face difficulties in various aspects of English writing. The…

This article explores a long-standing criticism of the task-based language teaching (TBLT) approach regarding the applicability of TBLT to curricula in English as a foreign language (EFL) settings and, specifically, whether authentic tasks can be designed for EFL learners. To further investigate this issue, the authors explored the EFL context of…

The internationalisation of higher education has been challenged by the significant decline in international student mobility caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The emergence of internationalisation at a distance before COVID-19 paved a new avenue for the internationalisation of higher education, with the distinctive feature of knowledge mobility…

This article presents an investigation of L2 pragmatic development by a group of 19 Chinese EFL teachers who participated in a five-month program in Canada (SA group). A written discourse-completion task (WDCT) was administered to assess participants' pragmatic knowledge of how to make requests in English. They also completed a paper-based…

This study reports an empirical study of an explicit instruction of corpus-aided Business English collocations and verifies its effectiveness in improving learners' collocation awareness and learner autonomy, as a result of which is significant improvement of learners' collocation competence. An eight-week instruction in keywords' collocations,…

This survey investigates to what degree the Chinese learners know about the discrepancies between Chinese and English thought patterns and their possible effects on English writing. Eighty-one students from North China Electric Power University participate in the survey. Qualitative and quantities approaches, involving the adoption of both…

Barriers that impede effective communication between scientists and journalists include communication styles and skills, professional jargon, mistrust, time constraints, and orientation to knowledge types and "facts." Here we describe an experiment in building bridges between journalists and scientists in Southeast Asia and Japan in a…