The research reported here investigated the everyday and scientific repertoires of children involved in semi-structured, Piagetian interviews carried out to check their understanding of dynamic astronomical concepts like daytime and night-time. It focused on the switching taking place between embedded and disembedded thinking; on the imagery which…

This viewpoint article provides a critical reflection on the gatekeeping and academic language practices of Anglophone universities, evaluating these in light of the promotional claims universities make about internationalization and global reach. I then consider the arguments put forward in each of the main articles in this special issue from…

This article describes an innovative approach to introducing translanguaging in an English for academic purposes (EAP) course at a young Sino-US joint-venture university in China. To promote the use of Chinese students' full linguistic and communicative repertoires in an English-medium-of-instruction university, I intentionally incorporated…

This study examines the interaction between learner-oriented codeswitching (CS) practices and the degree to which intermediate Chinese L2 learners of English engage in classroom interaction. The guiding questions are whether the teacher's CS use facilitates classroom interaction at moderate L2 proficiency, and if so, at which specific stages of…

Studies of student satisfaction in higher education settings highlight the contribution of teaching, learning and assessment, institutional status, and the personal factors of self-efficacy, preparedness, and sense of community. Transnational partnership research has identified that similar student satisfaction factors are experienced by mainland…

This study focuses on teacher talk in the context of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching in China. Framed against China's current focus on "thinking, imagination and innovation" as stated in the National English Curriculum Standards (NECS), this paper reports the findings of a qualitative study aimed at understanding how the…

This is the first collection of research studies to explore the potential for mixed methods to shed light on foreign or second language learning by young learners in instructed contexts. It brings together recent studies undertaken in Cameroon, China, Croatia, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Italy, Kenya, Mexico, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Tanzania and…

The present paper examines negotiation of meaning and language-related episodes in Chinese-German eTandem interaction, focusing on Chinese as target language. Against the background of the interactionist approach to language learning and drawing upon Swain and Lapkin's (1998, Interaction and second language learning: Two adolescent French…

This quantitative study investigated the extent and contexts of target language (TL) use in English language classrooms. Participants were 2,906 students from seven secondary schools and four universities in the more developed cities in southern China. They were put into five groups according to their educational stage and whether their content…

This article explores language ideologies and language uses in a multilingual university in Hong Kong by exploring the voices and experiences of both mainland Chinese and Hong Kong students. Drawing on the notions of language ideologies, separate multilingualism, and translanguaging, the research illustrates how students' linguistic ideologies are…

This research investigates cross-linguistic influence in the comprehension of L3 French past tense. A close examination was made on the L1 (Chinese) and L2 (English) transfer patterns among 20 English majors in their early acquisition of L3 French passé compose (PC). Data were collected through introspective think-aloud protocol in a comprehension…

Studies suggest that pre-service teachers' existing beliefs often serve as a lens to interpret the subject matter to be taught, guide their thoughts in lesson planning and shape their behaviour in classroom practices during their teaching practicum. This study examines how these beliefs affect pre-service teachers' conceptualization of…

This paper is based on a qualitative inquiry that investigated the role of teachers' mediation in three different modes of coding in a kindergarten foreign language classroom in China (i.e. L2-coded intralinguistic mediation, L1-coded cross-lingual mediation, and L2-and-L1-mixed mediation). Through an exploratory examination of the varying effects…

For their 61st annual conference, the Association of Literacy Educators and Researchers (ALER) met in St. Petersburg, Florida. This year's conference theme was "Engaging All Readers through Explorations of Literacy, Language, and Culture," which was also used as the title for this year's "Yearbook." This "Yearbook"…

This paper reports on the learning experience of Chinese and French students participating in a computer mediated communication (CMC) collaboration conducted in English and supported by Wikispaces, Animoto, and Skype. Several studies have investigated CMC contexts in which at least some participants were native speakers. Here, we address the…