Ready or not, a "transcultural" era is here. The dramatic expansion of airline travel and telecommunications technologies, tourism and student exchanges, immigration policies and trade agreements have served to connect vastly different peoples and places into increasingly complex relationships. Local, regional, and national economies are now…

This paper reports research designed to highlight how three groups of teachers make sense of linguistic, ethnic and cultural diversity in the classroom. The collecting of the data concentrated on the way in which the participants in the study worked together to construct socially negotiated meanings of linguistic diversity within the context of…

Few phenomena in recent history have generated investment, debate, and analysis as online/e-learning. Whether by Internet, video network, or other means, online course and program delivery has been heralded--and dismissed--as a vehicle for revolutionizing teaching and learning in higher education. However, after about a decade of start-ups,…

The purpose of this article is to provide a foundation for the development of evidence-based guidelines for the assessment of personality disorders, focusing in particular on integrated assessment strategies. The general strategy recommended herein is to first administer a self-report inventory to alert oneself to the potential presence of…

Objective: To provide reliable measures of the prevalence of all forms of child maltreatment in the UK that will be robust in the context of social and cultural differences due to social class, ethnicity and, region. Methods: Two thousand eight hundred sixty-nine (2,869) young adults aged 18-24, obtained by random probability sampling throughout…

This article unravels the political, public, and private discourse shadowing Mexican immigrants in the Southwestern U.S. The author illustrates how the dominant discourse with regard to immigration in the U.S. has led to the dehumanization of migrant people significantly impacting what occurs in their daily lives and directly influencing the…

This article uses empirical material from a qualitative study of adult and community learning (ACL) to explore issues around leading for equality and diversity in educational organisations. What the author is interested in is the way that the commitment to a "community" context in ACL opens up (or keeps open) certain possibilities for "diverse"…

Big "C" culture is en essential component of the foreign language classroom in so far as it helps students better understand what is important to native speakers from their cultural perspective. The national standards for foreign language encourage a person to focus on this perspective, through its cultural triangle highlighting the…

Alliances between Chinese and foreign usually western universities continue to attract considerable attention and one of the issues which remains of particular interest is the cross cultural dimension of such alliances and, in particular, the importance of understanding various strands and aspects of Chinese culture when negotiating and managing a…

This exploratory study examines cross-national similarities and differences in employee perceptions of issues in the work environment in 17 organizational work settings in seven Asia-Pacific countries; Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States. Employees at these 17 sites indicated their degree of…

In order to determine the prevalence and characteristics of childhood physical and sexual abuse in China, the authors conducted a survey in Shanghai. The Dissociative Disorders Interview Schedule was administered to 423 inpatients and 304 outpatients at Shanghai Mental Health Center, and to a non-clinical sample of 618 workers at a clothing…

A deafening counterpoint arose from the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina on 29 August 2005, and within that counterpoint race and music undeniably became the dominant voices. The devastation of New Orleans, however, was no more a "catastrophe of biblical proportions," as many with power have piously claimed, than the…

Native language affects the perception of segmental phonetic structure, of stress, and of semantic and pragmatic effects of intonation. Similarly, native language might influence the perception of similarities and differences among intonation contours. To test this hypothesis, a cross-language experiment was conducted. An English utterance was…

The present study examines sociolinguistic features of a particular speech act, paying compliments, by comparing and contrasting native Chinese and native American speakers' performances. By focusing on a relatively understudied speaker group such as the Chinese, typically regarded as having rules of speaking and social norms very different from…

In the past few decades, new governmental efforts to internationalize Japanese higher education have been in progress. One move has been to provide assistance to study abroad programs using English as the language of instruction. Though seen as an effective internationalization strategy, the consequences are by no means culturally neutral. This…