Cross-Cultural Studies and ELT-Designing a Cross-Cultural Communication Course

From country to country, social taboos, politics, religious traditions and values differ. Cross-cultural communication refers to communication between people of different cultures. This paper is about what will be discussed in the Cross-Cultural Communication course and how we can ＂teach＂ the target culture which involves so many topics to students who usually do not have close contact with native speakers of English and have little opportunity to discover how these speakers think, feel and act in their own way.

Improve English Speaking Skills for Vietnamese Students Through Teaching Tones and Their Communicative Values:A Case Study at Thu Dau Mot University

For those who are going to work with English at an advanced level as English-majored students,teachers or researchers,a deeper understanding about intonation is very important.At this level,intonation deals with more complicated features such as prominence,key,termination,tone,pitch sequence,and orientation in interactions.As a matter of fact,knowledge of these aspects is of crucial importance for advanced learners of English:It can help language users gain more confidence and proficiency in speaking the target language as well as in arriving at a complete understanding of English interactions.Based on the qualitative and quantitative data,the survey reveals the effect of teaching tones on developing speaking skills for advanced students of the language.Regarding the practical applications,this study serves to build up students’awareness and provide useful practice of the knowledge of tones they have to deal with in speech,thus outlining ways to improve speaking skills for students in Vietnamese contexts.

Design of Text-based Questions from the Study of Typology of Questions

Questions can be classified from different perspectives： grammatical form, communicative value, content orientation and cognitive level. In language pedagogy, text-based questioning as both an attention drawing device and a form of learning tasks serves text instruction. Therefore, language teachers preparing text-based questioning should take into consideration all dimensions of questions, especially cognitive requirement and communicative character. In addition, interaction between learner, text and the world can be achieved by the adoption of both about-the-text and beyond-the-text questions in teachers＇ text-based question construction.

Value and governance of high-speed railway

This paper considers multiple perspectives to explore the concept of high-speed railway(HSR),rationally abstract its value formation mechanism, and quantitatively measure its actual performance. This paper analyzes the governance potential of major countries in the high-speed railway value chain and studies the feasible ways and development strategies to enhance the highspeed railway governance in China. Findings of this paper are as follows. First, the government, as the early manager of high-speed railway governance, has given way to Siemens and other integrated enterprises. Second, the highspeed railway standard output has become the core competitiveness that embodies high-speed railway. Third,the global high-speed railway market presents a hierarchical high-speed railway governance model and changes to a modular approach to governance.