This article aims to analyze the difference of word order between English and Chinese languages after making a constructive study of them and concludes that it is the reflection of different thinking characteristics o...This article aims to analyze the difference of word order between English and Chinese languages after making a constructive study of them and concludes that it is the reflection of different thinking characteristics of the two nationalities. The difference of history development, cultural tradition, social economy and geographic environment naturally produces the thinking mode with the national features. The different features certainly influence the language expression. It is because language is not only the main carrier of thinking but also the important expression form. So to well study the features of thinking mode is of great importance to translation, foreign language teaching and cross-cultural communication.展开更多
This paper aims to explore how the study of sociolinguistics can benefit teachers,particularly in the context of teaching English as a Foreign Language(EFL)in China.The article will first examine how sociolinguistic k...This paper aims to explore how the study of sociolinguistics can benefit teachers,particularly in the context of teaching English as a Foreign Language(EFL)in China.The article will first examine how sociolinguistic knowledge can reshape teachers’perceptions of“English,”focusing on aspects such as English varieties,World Englishes,and Chinese English.Following that,the article discusses the necessity of rethinking current practices in English language teaching,including the nativeness paradigm and the concept of communicative competence based on a reconceptualized view of“English.”Additionally,the discussion will focus on how teachers,informed by sociolinguistic awareness of non-native teachers’identities and teacher agency,can address and resolve existing challenges in EFL teaching.Finally,the article will conclude by summarizing the key issues discussed and highlighting the significance of studying sociolinguistics for language practitioners in China.展开更多
Word is the most active factor in the research of culture connotations and it is essential in understanding the culture of target language. This article not only attempts to analyze non-equivalence in semantic and cul...Word is the most active factor in the research of culture connotations and it is essential in understanding the culture of target language. This article not only attempts to analyze non-equivalence in semantic and cultural connotation of words between Chinese and English words from cross-cultural perspective, but also highlights the profound understanding of the relation of culture, and language is the best way to avoid cross-cultural barriers and obstacles. Finally, by elaborating the loan words between two different cultures, the paper maintains the cultural integration out of respect, appreciation and acceptance is the embodiment of human social and cultural development of human society and the vitality of the cultural changes.展开更多
Idioms are the essence and gems of human wisdom and an important carrier of national culture. As a special form of language, they play an important role in intercultural communication. Due to the uniqueness of each cu...Idioms are the essence and gems of human wisdom and an important carrier of national culture. As a special form of language, they play an important role in intercultural communication. Due to the uniqueness of each culture, English and Chinese idioms are different in many aspects, values included. The present paper attempts to analyze the different values in English and Chinese idioms from three aspects: dependence vs independence, past-time orientation vs future-time orientation, and harmony vs competition. And the authors hope that it will be of some practical significance in people's intercultural communication.展开更多
Currently,intercultural language education is a topic which receives much interest due to the rise of globalization,but theories and practice in this field are on the preliminary stage of development in China.To under...Currently,intercultural language education is a topic which receives much interest due to the rise of globalization,but theories and practice in this field are on the preliminary stage of development in China.To understand ILE better,its background,theory basis,goals,related researches are reviewed and analyzed.Since ILE is relatively new in China,language teachers are facing new challenges in developing intercultural teaching competence to achieve the success of language education.Such challenges consist of understanding the language itself,the difficulty in understanding and teaching culture,designing practical classroom activities and selecting content.展开更多
Comparative study between English and Chinese attributes has been a research hotspot.The differences between English and Chinese attributes are elaborated by examples and translation strategies of English and Chinese ...Comparative study between English and Chinese attributes has been a research hotspot.The differences between English and Chinese attributes are elaborated by examples and translation strategies of English and Chinese attributes are discussed in this paper,from which the implications for translation teaching are stated at the same time.展开更多
Vagueness is one of the basic characteristic of natural language. Vague language is employed widely in advertising language. In this research cosmetic advertisements in Chinese and English magazines are selected and a...Vagueness is one of the basic characteristic of natural language. Vague language is employed widely in advertising language. In this research cosmetic advertisements in Chinese and English magazines are selected and analyzed. The results show that in Chinese and English cosmetic advertisements vague adjectives are the most frequently adopted, and that vague nouns and verbs are employed greatly. Comparatives, superlatives, hedges, numerals, quantifiers and pronouns are also used in advertisements.展开更多
Comments were made on the "word-for-word" literal translation method used by Mr. Nigel Wiseman in A Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine. He believes that only literal translation can reflect Chinese medical con...Comments were made on the "word-for-word" literal translation method used by Mr. Nigel Wiseman in A Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine. He believes that only literal translation can reflect Chinese medical concepts accurately. The so-called "word-for-word" translation is actually "English-word-for- Chinese-character" translation. First, the authors of the dictionary made a list of Single Characters with English Equivalents, and then they gave each character of the medical term an English equivalent according to the list. Finally, they made some minor modifications to make the rendering grammatically smoother. Many English terms thus produced are confusing. The defect of the word-for-word literal translation stems from the erroneous idea that a single character constitutes the basic element of meaning corresponding to the notion of "word" in English, and the meaning of a disyllabic or polysyllabic Chinese word is the simple addition of the constituent characters. Another big mistake is the negligence of the polysemy of Chinese characters. One or two English equivalents can by no means cover all the various meanings of a single character which is a polysemous monosyllabic word. Various examples were cited from this dictionary to illustrate the mistakes.展开更多
Mr. Wiseman believes that Western medical terms chosen as equivalents of Chinese medical terms should be the words known to all speakers and not requiring any specialist knowledge or instrumentation to understand or i...Mr. Wiseman believes that Western medical terms chosen as equivalents of Chinese medical terms should be the words known to all speakers and not requiring any specialist knowledge or instrumentation to understand or identify, and strictly technical Western medical terms should be avoided regardless of their conceptual conformity to the Chinese terms. Accordingly, many inappropriate Western medical terms are selected as English equivalents by the authors of the Dictionary, and on the other hand, many ready-made appropriate Western medical terms are replaced by loan English terms with the Chinese style of word formation. The experience gained in solving the problems of translating Western medical terms into Chinese when West- ern medicine was first introduced to China is helpful for translating Chinese medical terms into English. However, the authors of the Dictionary adhere to their own opinions, ignoring others" experience. The English terms thus created do not reflect the genuine meaning of the Chinese terms, but make the English glossary in chaos. The so-called true face of traditional Chinese revealed by such terms is merely the Chinese custom of word formation and metaphoric rhetoric. In other words, traditional Chinese medicine is not regarded as a system of medicine but merely some Oriental folklore.展开更多
How does one teach composition to Chinese college students of English? How does one teach thera to discover ideas for themselves and to put these into English patterns of thought and organization? Can the discovery of...How does one teach composition to Chinese college students of English? How does one teach thera to discover ideas for themselves and to put these into English patterns of thought and organization? Can the discovery of ideas really be taught? Is there a method of teaching whereby the scientific process of writing can be cornbined with the creative art of composition?展开更多
Both China and Britain have gone through a long history of feudal society, in which women did not enjoy any kind Of social status. They were deprived of social, political, economic and cultural rights and discriminate...Both China and Britain have gone through a long history of feudal society, in which women did not enjoy any kind Of social status. They were deprived of social, political, economic and cultural rights and discriminated against by a male-dominant society. The discrimination against women has left its traces in both Chinese and English languages and cultures, even when the language and culture have changed significantly in the migration to another continent (as in the ease of American English). This paper discusses sexism in the two languages and cultures from a comparative perspective.展开更多
This historical study investigates the concept of learner autonomy in the national English language curricula for Chinese universities.It seeks to understand the meaning of learner autonomy in China and the intentiona...This historical study investigates the concept of learner autonomy in the national English language curricula for Chinese universities.It seeks to understand the meaning of learner autonomy in China and the intentionality of promoting this concept through the curricula from 1978 to 2007.By adopting Quentin Skinner’s intentionalist approach to analyzing the history of ideas,this study conducted a systematic document analysis of three national curricula in relation to their linguistic and practical contexts constituted of 169 Chinese academic articles in total.The study revealed that learner autonomy mainly referred to students’motivation and ability to work hard on their own outside the classroom in the Chinese context.Importing this concept,however,caused ideological confusion and exacerbated the disempowerment of teachers within the dynamics of China’s English language education at the tertiary level.The study raises awareness for borrowing concepts across different cultural contexts and has implications for research,policymaking,teacher development,and pedagogical practice in second language education in China.展开更多
By dividing English learners in Chinese university context into intermediate and advanced level learners, the essay argues that fluency rather than accuracy is needed for most university students. It further discusses...By dividing English learners in Chinese university context into intermediate and advanced level learners, the essay argues that fluency rather than accuracy is needed for most university students. It further discusses some suitable teaching methods in both contexts respectively to balance this pair of objective focus.展开更多
This paper gives an understanding of PAD-based class acceptance among modern Chinese college students’English learning.It first introduces the brief definition of what the PAD-based class is,as well as the situation ...This paper gives an understanding of PAD-based class acceptance among modern Chinese college students’English learning.It first introduces the brief definition of what the PAD-based class is,as well as the situation of English language learning in present China,especially the learning amongst Chinese college students.And then it focuses on the acceptance of the PADbased class in the English learning of Chinese college students,including the breakthrough of the traditional Chinese classroom teaching mode and the innovation of the PAD-based class among Chinese college students’English learning.展开更多
Translation lexicons are fundamental to natural language processing tasks like machine translation and cross language information retrieval. This paper presents a lexicon builder that can auto extract (or assist lexic...Translation lexicons are fundamental to natural language processing tasks like machine translation and cross language information retrieval. This paper presents a lexicon builder that can auto extract (or assist lexicographer in compiling) the word translations from Chinese English parallel corpus. Key mechanisms in this builder system are further described, including co occurrence measure, indirection association resolution and multi word unit translation. Experiment results indicate the effectiveness of the authors’ method and the potentiality of the lexicon builder system.展开更多
It is difficult for L2 English learners in general, and especially Chinese learners of English, to form idiomatic collocations. This article presents a comparison of the use of intensifier-verb collocations in English...It is difficult for L2 English learners in general, and especially Chinese learners of English, to form idiomatic collocations. This article presents a comparison of the use of intensifier-verb collocations in English by native speaker students and Chinese ESL learners, paying particular attention to verbs which collocate with intensifiers. The data consisted of written production from three corpora: two of these are native English corpora: the British Academic Written English(BAWE) Corpus and Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers(MICUSP). The third one is a recently created Chinese Learner English corpus, Ten-thousand English Compositions of Chinese Learners(TECCL).Findings suggest that Chinese learners of English produce significantly more intensifier-verb collocations than native speaker students, but that their English attests a smaller variety of intensifier-verb collocations compared with the native speakers. Moreover, Chinese learners of English use the intensifier-verb collocation types just-verb, only-verb and really-verb very frequently compared with native speaker students. As regards verb collocates, the intensifiers hardly, clearly,well, strongly and deeply collocate with semantically different verbs in native and Chinese learner English. Compared with the patterns in Chinese learner English, the intensifiers in native speaker English collocate with a more stable and restricted set of verb collocates.展开更多
Most educated Chinese take English as an important communication tool and the language has been increasingly frequently used in all walks of life in the country. This paper is to examine the use of English emotion wor...Most educated Chinese take English as an important communication tool and the language has been increasingly frequently used in all walks of life in the country. This paper is to examine the use of English emotion words on the target group of English learners in China. The study is designed to find out the relationship between the use of emotion words and such relevant variables as language proficiency, gender, and age. The results demonstrate that the use of emotion words is significantly linked to the level of proficiency as well as gender. Age is found to have slight effect on the use of emotion words. The study also reveals that more positive emotion words are produced than negative ones in the speech. Based on the major findings, some implications and suggestions are offered: Firstly, English learners in China are expected to improve their language proficiency, particularly that of listening and speaking. Secondly, they are supposed to enhance their culture awareness of English by means of exposing themselves to as much authentic language as possible.展开更多
文摘This article aims to analyze the difference of word order between English and Chinese languages after making a constructive study of them and concludes that it is the reflection of different thinking characteristics of the two nationalities. The difference of history development, cultural tradition, social economy and geographic environment naturally produces the thinking mode with the national features. The different features certainly influence the language expression. It is because language is not only the main carrier of thinking but also the important expression form. So to well study the features of thinking mode is of great importance to translation, foreign language teaching and cross-cultural communication.
文摘This paper aims to explore how the study of sociolinguistics can benefit teachers,particularly in the context of teaching English as a Foreign Language(EFL)in China.The article will first examine how sociolinguistic knowledge can reshape teachers’perceptions of“English,”focusing on aspects such as English varieties,World Englishes,and Chinese English.Following that,the article discusses the necessity of rethinking current practices in English language teaching,including the nativeness paradigm and the concept of communicative competence based on a reconceptualized view of“English.”Additionally,the discussion will focus on how teachers,informed by sociolinguistic awareness of non-native teachers’identities and teacher agency,can address and resolve existing challenges in EFL teaching.Finally,the article will conclude by summarizing the key issues discussed and highlighting the significance of studying sociolinguistics for language practitioners in China.
文摘Word is the most active factor in the research of culture connotations and it is essential in understanding the culture of target language. This article not only attempts to analyze non-equivalence in semantic and cultural connotation of words between Chinese and English words from cross-cultural perspective, but also highlights the profound understanding of the relation of culture, and language is the best way to avoid cross-cultural barriers and obstacles. Finally, by elaborating the loan words between two different cultures, the paper maintains the cultural integration out of respect, appreciation and acceptance is the embodiment of human social and cultural development of human society and the vitality of the cultural changes.
文摘Idioms are the essence and gems of human wisdom and an important carrier of national culture. As a special form of language, they play an important role in intercultural communication. Due to the uniqueness of each culture, English and Chinese idioms are different in many aspects, values included. The present paper attempts to analyze the different values in English and Chinese idioms from three aspects: dependence vs independence, past-time orientation vs future-time orientation, and harmony vs competition. And the authors hope that it will be of some practical significance in people's intercultural communication.
文摘Currently,intercultural language education is a topic which receives much interest due to the rise of globalization,but theories and practice in this field are on the preliminary stage of development in China.To understand ILE better,its background,theory basis,goals,related researches are reviewed and analyzed.Since ILE is relatively new in China,language teachers are facing new challenges in developing intercultural teaching competence to achieve the success of language education.Such challenges consist of understanding the language itself,the difficulty in understanding and teaching culture,designing practical classroom activities and selecting content.
文摘Comparative study between English and Chinese attributes has been a research hotspot.The differences between English and Chinese attributes are elaborated by examples and translation strategies of English and Chinese attributes are discussed in this paper,from which the implications for translation teaching are stated at the same time.
文摘Vagueness is one of the basic characteristic of natural language. Vague language is employed widely in advertising language. In this research cosmetic advertisements in Chinese and English magazines are selected and analyzed. The results show that in Chinese and English cosmetic advertisements vague adjectives are the most frequently adopted, and that vague nouns and verbs are employed greatly. Comparatives, superlatives, hedges, numerals, quantifiers and pronouns are also used in advertisements.
文摘Comments were made on the "word-for-word" literal translation method used by Mr. Nigel Wiseman in A Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine. He believes that only literal translation can reflect Chinese medical concepts accurately. The so-called "word-for-word" translation is actually "English-word-for- Chinese-character" translation. First, the authors of the dictionary made a list of Single Characters with English Equivalents, and then they gave each character of the medical term an English equivalent according to the list. Finally, they made some minor modifications to make the rendering grammatically smoother. Many English terms thus produced are confusing. The defect of the word-for-word literal translation stems from the erroneous idea that a single character constitutes the basic element of meaning corresponding to the notion of "word" in English, and the meaning of a disyllabic or polysyllabic Chinese word is the simple addition of the constituent characters. Another big mistake is the negligence of the polysemy of Chinese characters. One or two English equivalents can by no means cover all the various meanings of a single character which is a polysemous monosyllabic word. Various examples were cited from this dictionary to illustrate the mistakes.
文摘Mr. Wiseman believes that Western medical terms chosen as equivalents of Chinese medical terms should be the words known to all speakers and not requiring any specialist knowledge or instrumentation to understand or identify, and strictly technical Western medical terms should be avoided regardless of their conceptual conformity to the Chinese terms. Accordingly, many inappropriate Western medical terms are selected as English equivalents by the authors of the Dictionary, and on the other hand, many ready-made appropriate Western medical terms are replaced by loan English terms with the Chinese style of word formation. The experience gained in solving the problems of translating Western medical terms into Chinese when West- ern medicine was first introduced to China is helpful for translating Chinese medical terms into English. However, the authors of the Dictionary adhere to their own opinions, ignoring others" experience. The English terms thus created do not reflect the genuine meaning of the Chinese terms, but make the English glossary in chaos. The so-called true face of traditional Chinese revealed by such terms is merely the Chinese custom of word formation and metaphoric rhetoric. In other words, traditional Chinese medicine is not regarded as a system of medicine but merely some Oriental folklore.
文摘How does one teach composition to Chinese college students of English? How does one teach thera to discover ideas for themselves and to put these into English patterns of thought and organization? Can the discovery of ideas really be taught? Is there a method of teaching whereby the scientific process of writing can be cornbined with the creative art of composition?
文摘Both China and Britain have gone through a long history of feudal society, in which women did not enjoy any kind Of social status. They were deprived of social, political, economic and cultural rights and discriminated against by a male-dominant society. The discrimination against women has left its traces in both Chinese and English languages and cultures, even when the language and culture have changed significantly in the migration to another continent (as in the ease of American English). This paper discusses sexism in the two languages and cultures from a comparative perspective.
基金This work was supported by the MOE Project of Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences in Universities in China.
文摘This historical study investigates the concept of learner autonomy in the national English language curricula for Chinese universities.It seeks to understand the meaning of learner autonomy in China and the intentionality of promoting this concept through the curricula from 1978 to 2007.By adopting Quentin Skinner’s intentionalist approach to analyzing the history of ideas,this study conducted a systematic document analysis of three national curricula in relation to their linguistic and practical contexts constituted of 169 Chinese academic articles in total.The study revealed that learner autonomy mainly referred to students’motivation and ability to work hard on their own outside the classroom in the Chinese context.Importing this concept,however,caused ideological confusion and exacerbated the disempowerment of teachers within the dynamics of China’s English language education at the tertiary level.The study raises awareness for borrowing concepts across different cultural contexts and has implications for research,policymaking,teacher development,and pedagogical practice in second language education in China.
文摘By dividing English learners in Chinese university context into intermediate and advanced level learners, the essay argues that fluency rather than accuracy is needed for most university students. It further discusses some suitable teaching methods in both contexts respectively to balance this pair of objective focus.
文摘This paper gives an understanding of PAD-based class acceptance among modern Chinese college students’English learning.It first introduces the brief definition of what the PAD-based class is,as well as the situation of English language learning in present China,especially the learning amongst Chinese college students.And then it focuses on the acceptance of the PADbased class in the English learning of Chinese college students,including the breakthrough of the traditional Chinese classroom teaching mode and the innovation of the PAD-based class among Chinese college students’English learning.
文摘Translation lexicons are fundamental to natural language processing tasks like machine translation and cross language information retrieval. This paper presents a lexicon builder that can auto extract (or assist lexicographer in compiling) the word translations from Chinese English parallel corpus. Key mechanisms in this builder system are further described, including co occurrence measure, indirection association resolution and multi word unit translation. Experiment results indicate the effectiveness of the authors’ method and the potentiality of the lexicon builder system.
文摘It is difficult for L2 English learners in general, and especially Chinese learners of English, to form idiomatic collocations. This article presents a comparison of the use of intensifier-verb collocations in English by native speaker students and Chinese ESL learners, paying particular attention to verbs which collocate with intensifiers. The data consisted of written production from three corpora: two of these are native English corpora: the British Academic Written English(BAWE) Corpus and Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers(MICUSP). The third one is a recently created Chinese Learner English corpus, Ten-thousand English Compositions of Chinese Learners(TECCL).Findings suggest that Chinese learners of English produce significantly more intensifier-verb collocations than native speaker students, but that their English attests a smaller variety of intensifier-verb collocations compared with the native speakers. Moreover, Chinese learners of English use the intensifier-verb collocation types just-verb, only-verb and really-verb very frequently compared with native speaker students. As regards verb collocates, the intensifiers hardly, clearly,well, strongly and deeply collocate with semantically different verbs in native and Chinese learner English. Compared with the patterns in Chinese learner English, the intensifiers in native speaker English collocate with a more stable and restricted set of verb collocates.
文摘Most educated Chinese take English as an important communication tool and the language has been increasingly frequently used in all walks of life in the country. This paper is to examine the use of English emotion words on the target group of English learners in China. The study is designed to find out the relationship between the use of emotion words and such relevant variables as language proficiency, gender, and age. The results demonstrate that the use of emotion words is significantly linked to the level of proficiency as well as gender. Age is found to have slight effect on the use of emotion words. The study also reveals that more positive emotion words are produced than negative ones in the speech. Based on the major findings, some implications and suggestions are offered: Firstly, English learners in China are expected to improve their language proficiency, particularly that of listening and speaking. Secondly, they are supposed to enhance their culture awareness of English by means of exposing themselves to as much authentic language as possible.