A number of studies have reported the cultural representations in English textbooks in many contexts, especially those in Asia. However, these studies relied on a small data set and the findings suffered severe limitations. To overcome such shortcomings, we self-built a corpus that has 40 volumes/books of over one million words to examine the…

This paper reports on our inquiry into how language teachers' identities relate to their efforts to teach intercultural communicative competence. In the study, we collected data through in-depth interviews with and observations of 16 Chinese language teachers in Hong Kong's international schools. The analysis revealed that the participants…

Critical English language teaching (ELT) research is expanding in scope, covering topics such as linguistic imperialism, native-speakerism, and the intersections between issues of race, class, and gender. With this expansion comes a requirement for robust and rigorous methods of data collection and analysis for researchers to employ. This article…

Integrating twenty-first century competencies into the curriculum has become an important issue for education reform worldwide. This study examines and compares twenty-first century competencies demonstrated in mother tongue curriculum standards in China, the United States and Finland. It identifies key similarities and significant differences…

Research on the representation of culture in language textbooks rarely incorporates the concept of global citizenship, despite its increasing relevance to language education in our globalising world. To address this critique, a mixed-method study was conducted to investigate cultural representation in Japanese elementary school English textbooks,…

This paper develops an interdisciplinary critical perspective on the concept of "Confucian Heritage Cultures" (CHC), used in intercultural and English language teaching theory to explain the supposed culturally distinct learning habits, expectations and schemas many Asian students bring to academic classrooms in English-speaking…

Despite extensive discussion on critical thinking (CT) by Chinese students, there are still debates over the question of why Chinese higher education students, when studying abroad, lack (or rather do not demonstrate) CT skills. The main objective of this paper is to explore how far it can be established from the published research literature…

Vietnamese, like other immigrant languages, experiences decline in various forms from the time that its speakers first arrive in the US, a process that gathers pace in the second generation, and often leads to a near-complete loss of the language in the third generation. The article deals with the ways in which Vietnamese-Americans have attempted…

The paper reports the results of a naturalistic enquiry into written request strategies in emails sent by Chinese learners of English to their teachers. A corpus of 600 emails was collected in the course of an academic year. CCARP (Cross-Cultural Speech-Act Realisation Project) segmentation and coding was used to analyse the requests contained in…

This paper examines the widespread practice of Chinese learners choosing (and sometimes refusing) to adopt English and Anglicised names. Data collected from questionnaires and interviews with both students and teachers are analysed in order to arrive at an understanding of why such a practice has arisen and continues to be perpetuated throughout…

With an increasing number of Chinese learners pursuing higher education in Western universities, the characteristics of Chinese students have raised many discussions and debates (e.g. Carson, 1992; Watkins & Biggs, 2001). Two contradictory views are commonly reflected in the existing literature: being passive, quiet, submissive, or disciplined…