In 2022, the Ministry of Education launched the Collaborative Quality Improvement Programme for Normal Education, which coordinates leading normal universities to provide essential support to weaker normal colleges and universities in underdeveloped central and western regions. A key component of this initiative is enhancing information infrastructure to facilitate the sharing of high-quality educational resources among participating institutions. Thus, the digital agency of teacher educators participating in the programme is crucial for its successful and smooth execution. Grounded in ecological theory, this study focuses on foreign language teacher educators from two collaborating institutions. Through a case study approach, it explores developmental mechanisms of their digital-intelligent educational agency within the new cross-institutional collaborative ecosystem. The goal is to offer theoretical insights and practical implications to further develop the Collaborative Quality Enhancement Plan in teacher education.

With the development and widespread application of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), foreign language education is facing unprecedented challenges and opportunities. How teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) can utilize GenAI in professional development has become an important research topic that urgently needs exploration. Drawing on multiple sources of data, this qualitative study systematically explores how three middle-school English teachers, in a lesson study project, integrate and utilize GenAI in their EFL teaching and professional development. The findings identify three routes of professional development for the teachers: 1) from “technostress” to “integration and innovation”; 2) from “improvisation” to “evidence-based improvement”; and 3) from “externally driven” to “collective efficacy”. The study highlights that the EFL teachers’ professional development in the GenAI era  is essentially a dynamic evolution process, covering multiple aspects such as cognitive reconstruction, decision optimization, and deepened reflection. It also offers important implications for EFL teacher development.

With the rapid rise of short-form content platforms such as TikTok, the traditional role of the “teacher” has undergone unprecedented transformations in digital contexts. Focusing on popular French-language teaching creators, this study analyzes linguistic, paralinguistic, bodily, and media modalities in TikTok short videos. Drawing on the Motivation Model of Pragmatics, it examines how 14 creators negotiate between transactional and interactional intentions, balancing “teaching” with “attracting views” and “authority” with “affinity”. Our finding reveals that while TikTok’s multimodal affordances facilitate the construction of professional identity, its entertainment-driven mechanisms also intensify audience participation and interaction. This dual dynamic gives rise to three typical identity types: the authoritative knowledge teacher, the friendly guide, and the performative entertainer.

Based on the PICRAT model, this study conducted a questionnaire survey among 1, 008 primary school English teachers based in Shanghai. The research aimed to investigate how the teachers utilise digital and intelligent technologies to enhance textbook use, identify factors influencing their use of technology, and propose strategies to address the challenges they face. The findings reveal that the teachers’ technology use mainly focuses on improving efficiency and providing additional resources. The technologies are most frequently used to “Replace” existing teaching media, followed by applications to “Amplify” teaching and learning practices, and the use to “Transform” practices is minimal. The teachers face challenges such as insufficient technological literacy, limited access to tools, resource misalignment, inadequate policy support and collegial networks. To advance from merely “teaching with technology” to “empowering learning through technology,” it is essential to build a robust teacher-education support system for AI-empowered textbook use and promote the use of AI toward the “Creative” and “Transformative” dimensions of the PICRAT model. By applying the PICRAT model to technology-empowered textbook use and exploring the application of technology integration theory in primary school English education, this study provides data-driven insights and recommendations for the “AI+ Education” initiative, thereby supporting the improvement of teachers’ digital literacy.

School education is the most important channel for knowledge acquisition. However, what the educators have long been interested in is teaching methodology rather than knowledge itself. To solve the problem of what Karl Maton calls “knowledge blindness”, scholars of both SFL and social pedagogy have made some successful experiments, yet, as Jim Martin points out that further efforts are still needed to find more effective ways to help students to know what knowledge is and how knowledge can be accumulated. This paper attempts to achieve this goal by looking at how power words, power grammar, power composition and intertextuality work in the process of knowledge building in academic discourse.

The comprehension of ambiguous relative clauses by second language (L2) learners has been a heated topic in psycholinguistics, but the debate is still ongoing as to whether L1 and L2 readers show similar attachment preferences. Importantly, the effects of emotionality on relative clause attachment in L2 are still underexplored. By employing self-paced reading tasks and offline attachment choice tasks, the current study explored the ambiguity resolution of relative clause (RC) attachment in second language from the perspective of emotion by conducting four experiments with 342 Chinese EFL learners. The results show that: (1) under the neutral condition, advanced Chinese EFL learners fail to show an NP2 attachment preference frequently reported by L1 studies, which lends support to the Shallow Structure Hypothesis; (2) under the emotional condition, due to attention and memory advantages, negative antecedents with greater biological relevance can enhance their topicality, and therefore are more likely to host the RC; (3) different patterns of RC attachment preferences between the online reading tasks and the offline attachment choice tasks could be attributable to the two tasks’ differences in explicitness, time course of RC attachment, and demands on working memory capacity. This study betters our understanding of the factors influencing attachment preferences in L2 relative clauses and extends research on L2 emotional word processing, offering a novel perspective for investigating L2 emotional word processing in sentential contexts.

Based on Chen Xiren’s (2009) framework of pragmatic competence, this study compares natural conversational data between Chinese EFL learners and American native speakers to investigate the relationship between pragmatic disfluency and L2 pragmatic competence. The findings reveal that learners tend to rely more on non-lexical fillers, while native speakers employ a wider range of pragmatic markers with richer functions. A nonlinear relationship exists between pragmatic disfluency and pragmatic competence: overuse may reflect cognitive load in retrieving pragmatic knowledge, whereas strategic use demonstrates emerging interactional management skills. While learners’ performance in interpersonal interaction approaches that of native speakers, their ability in information regulation and adaptation to complex contexts remains underdeveloped. Pedagogy should combine formulaic training with authentic interactive tasks to facilitate a transition from form-focused to context-adaptive competence.

Chroniques de l’étrange, translated by the French sinologist André Lévy, is the first and only complete French version of Liaozhai zhiyi. The translation is distinguished by its rich and diverse range of paratexts, which not only reflects the translator’s distinctive style but also serves multiple functions. This study focuses on the paratexts in Lévy’s translation and reveals that internal paratexts provide readers with background knowledge, compensate for cultural gaps, reconstruct cultural contexts, and establish intertextual connections. External paratexts, on the other hand, reveal the translator’s intervention, reflect the reception of the translation, and offer multiple interpretations of the text. Together, these paratexts create an effective bridge among the source text, the translation, the translator, and the target-language readers.

Robert Burns’ lyric poem “A Red, Red Rose” has been translated incessantly in China since 1908. The four translators — Su Manshu, Yuan Shuipai, Yuan Kejia and Guo Moruo lived under different social backgrounds. They also differed in academic backgrounds, personal identities, and, consequently, in their translation materials, translation purposes and translation styles. Su Manshu and Guo Moruo both employed classical poetic forms, an approach characterized by utility-obtaining and ultra utility-obtaining; Yuan Shuipai and Yuan Kejia adopted vernacular rhyming translations, an approach characterized by both truth-seeking and utility-obtaining.

Martine Vallette-Hémery is the most prolific French sinologist to have translated Chinese classical prose in the twentieth century. Her anthologies—representing nearly half of all French-language renderings of the genre—have been repeatedly reprinted and remain a visible and durable presence in the French book market. Focusing on two sub-genres, landscape travel writing (shanshui youji) and aphoristic essays (qingyan xiaopin), this paper examines the selection and translation strategies she employed to fashion a genre-based model aimed at general readers, traces the reception trajectory of her works in France and offers empirically grounded pathways for future Chinese-literature translation projects.

Few translation studies have their attention to the realization of persuasive rhetoric in the target text, and even less to the translator’s interventions on the rhetoric of identification. This paper takes the persuasive discourse in Journey to the West, particularly the utterance when Tripitaka and his disciples pass through different countries. Through the lens of the metafunctions, as purported by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this study delves into the realization of identification in the translation by Waley and Lovell. Based on the characteristics of the rhetorical context, the study infers the translators’ intervention intentions. The findings can be summarized as follows: the lexicogrammatical configuration in Waley’s translation leads to a weakening of the rhetorical strength of identification, and the shift from speech to narrative as well as mistranslations results in a reduction in the amount of identification rhetoric. Lovell’s extensive omissions also cause a decrease in the amount of identification rhetoric. Her interventions occur more frequently in the rhetorical context of “the pursuit of the void”, with the rhetorical intention of weakening the religious narrative. By contrast, Waley’s interventions occur more often in the rhetorical context of “unified goals”, with the rhetorical intention of weakening the character narrative discourse.

Discourse is the basic resource of English teaching, and discourses in textbooks are an integral part of students’ learning content. English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools states that teachers should probe into the discourses and grasp the core content of teaching. The in-depth interpretation of textbook discourses is particularly important for the implementation of in-depth teaching. Based on extended cognition, this study puts forward three levels of discourse: logical, contextual and situational. Accordingly, when interpreting a discourse, teachers are also required to take the logic of knowledge, the context of the text and the situational nature of the language as an organic whole, go beyond the surface structure of knowledge, enter the teaching of deep structure, and lead the teaching to the depths of students’ thinking and emotion.

The cultivation of talent in strategically significant foreign languages constitutes a core component of China’s current national education agenda. This study traces the conceptual evolution of “critical languages”and situates their development within broader national strategic imperatives. Focusing on early-stage talent cultivation in Shanghai’s basic education system, it examines the top-level institutional design, the construction of research-and-teaching support structures, and the development of interdisciplinary and integrated curricula. The paper provides a systematic account of the historical trajectory, major policy initiatives, and practical outcomes achieved to date. It further identifies persistent challenges in policy coordination, training pathways, assessment frameworks, faculty capacity building, and resource development. In response, the study proposes a set of forward-looking strategies, including establishing a citywide model zone for high-quality instruction, constructing a vertically integrated talent pipeline, developing cross-grade language proficiency scales, and employing AI technologies to enhance pedagogical effectiveness.

This study adopts Appraisal Theory to conduct a positive discourse analysis of moral values in primary school English textbooks widely used in China. The study finds that: 1) Overall, there are no moral values represented in Grade One. From Grade Two to Grade Four, there is one or two moral values. In Grade Five and Grade Six, there are four and three moral values respectively. Totally there are eight types of moral values, the content of which conforms to Piagetian Moral Stage Theory. 2) Judgment resources take the largest proportion in all values. And in judgment, social sanction outnumbers social esteem. Apart from the lack of appreciation resources in the value of animal protection, the seven values all include affect, appreciation and judgment. The findings may be helpful for researchers to better understand the characteristics of moral values representation in Chinese primary school English textbooks and provide suggestions for future teaching practices and textbook development.