Employing 'identity' as an analytical lens, this study examined a group of novice school counselling teachers' (SCTs) professional identities in the Chinese context. Informed by a multiple, integrated theoretical perspective focusing on the cognitive, social, and emotional dimensions of teacher identities, the findings reveal five types of…

In China, formal school groupings known as 'education collectives' have become one of the most common forms of school-to-school collaboration, promoted by policymakers to narrow the achievement gap between schools and optimise resource allocation. Previous research has focused on the purposes and achievements of education collectives rather than…

The present study continues research that takes non-serious language more seriously (Cekaite and Aronsson 2005) by focusing on a central second language (L2) Metaphoric Competence factor, Metaphor Language Play (MLP). For willing learners, MLP offers a diversity of benefits (Bushnell 2009; Bell 2012a) despite being one of the most challenging…

While historically and ideologically peripheralised in modern Chinese politics, traditional culture has been discursively rehabilitated by the Chinese communist regime in recent years. Existing literature on this phenomenon tends to focus on the politicisation of culture, that is, how Chinese culture, particularly the Confucian tradition, is…

This paper investigated teacher wellbeing in a rapidly expanding educational context of Universities of the Third Age in China. Based on the analysis of 48 metaphors innovatively elicited from 27 teacher participants, important cognitive, affective and social aspects of teaching and learning that configure teacher wellbeing have been outlined. It…

Purpose: This study investigated irony comprehension by Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants, focusing on how prosodic and visual cues contribute to their comprehension, and whether second-order Theory of Mind is required for using these cues. Method: We tested 52 Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (aged 3-7 years) and…

Studies have shown that informing language learners about the literal underpinning of idioms can help them to remember these expressions. It has also been suggested that prompting learners to guess the meaning of lexical items may be beneficial because it can pique their curiosity and promote cognitive engagement. In the case of idioms, the…

Arguably, the most contentious debate in the field of eye movement control in reading has centered on whether words are lexically processed serially or in parallel during reading. Chinese is character-based and unspaced, meaning the issue of how lexical processing is operationalized across potentially ambiguous, multicharacter strings is not…

The purpose of the study was to examine the effects of an instructional sequence involving simple tact, category tact, and match-to-sample instructions on the emergence of metaphorical extensions about emotions for children with autism spectrum disorder. Three Chinese children (1 girl, 2 boys, 7-8 years old) with autism spectrum disorder…

A major development in recent years concerning the growth of 'private English-speaking international schooling' has been the transition from a 'traditional' mode of activity towards a 'non-traditional' context. This is especially the case in Asia, where the majority of international schools now reside. Moreover, we find that in Mainland China…

Purpose: This paper discusses Chinese students' negative and positive written feedback about Thai teachers using metaphorical descriptions and the links between it and their classroom experiences. Methodology: An open-response questionnaire was employed to collect the data from 21 Chinese female students. The questionnaire provided both positive…

Studies have shown that raising L2 learners' metaphor awareness contributes to the acquisition of figurative language, which fosters students' development of language skills. However, the instruments measuring metaphor awareness, in the majority of relevant research, did not seem to have undergone proper methodological procedures for checking…

Foucauldian critical studies are cornucopian in illustrating how policy as discourse normalizes and yields human beings into made subjects in modern societies. However, Foucault's own slide from the 'terminal stage of discourse' pays little attention to the linguistic elements, and thus weakens the theory's potency in explaining the reality.…

In spite of the fact that task-based language teaching (TBLT) has been extensively researched in both experimental and authentic contexts, there is a scarcity of research on TBLT in the area of pre-service teaching. Our current study seeks to help fill this gap via the examination of the attitudes of thirty-nine pre-service teachers -- after an…

This study focuses on the experiences and feelings of pre-school children in two different regions about English learning to identify attitudinal differences in these attitudes between remote and urban areas. The research adopted the elicited metaphor analysis (EMA) to investigate the interest and preferences for English learning of 160 Chinese…