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.

In response to the new requirements for higher-order thinking skills in the AI era, this paper investigates an innovative approach to fostering critical thinking by integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into the EFL reading instruction. It constructs and illustrates a three-step cyclical teaching model (diagnose-challenge-reconstruct) designed to externalize and scaffold the internal process of critical thinking. The LLM is tasked with the dual roles of diagnosing and challenging, offering both analytical feedback and counterarguments to students’ initial perspectives. Students, in turn, critically engage with, reflect upon and revise their ideas, leading to a profounder and reconstructed understanding. This human-AI collaborative paradigm not only revitalizes conventional pedagogy but also prompts a shift in the teacher’s role from a knowledge transmitter to a critical thinking facilitator. The ultimate objective is to equip students with the essential skills of independent thinking and sound judgment necessary for navigating a complex information society.

Emotion in the translation of children’s literature is of vital importance to child readers’ emotional perception of the translated works and children’s emotional development. We propose that the cognitive equivalence of emotion in the translation of children’s literature includes the effective transmission of emotional texture, emotional intensity and emotional aesthetics. The three complement each other and together constitute the system of emotional cognitive equivalence. In the face of the challenge of emotional translation of children’s literature, the translator needs to judge the degree and change of the original emotion by tracing back to the emotional vocabulary of the source text, and restore the aesthetic characteristics of the original image beauty and phonetic beauty, so as to promote the cognitive schema of the text emotion among the original author, the translator and the reader to achieve the fusion of horizons, and to convey the emotional texture, intensity and aesthetic characteristics of the source text to the greatest extent, so as to finally realize the emotional equivalence in the translation of children’s literature.

This study employed a meta-analytic structural equation modeling approach to synthesize data from 24 studies with a total of 15, 828 valid samples. The results indicate that foreign language enjoyment and foreign language anxiety are two emotional dimensions that are both interrelated and independent, each exerting a significant influence on foreign language achievement. Meanwhile, four moderating variables including gender, language skills, cultural group, and second language affect the relationship between these two emotional factors and foreign language achievement to varying degrees. Further comparisons reveal that, compared with foreign language anxiety, foreign language enjoyment exerts a stronger impact on foreign language achievement.

This study utilizes natural language processing (NLP) technology to construct a Japanese discourse cohesion index system. It then investigates the acquisition of discourse cohesion in Japanese by advanced learners with different native languages, specifically Chinese and Korean. The findings reveal discrepancies between the essays written by advanced learners and those written by native speakers in aspects such as lexical overlap, semantic overlap, connectives, and references. By calculating the Euclidean distance between the cohesion indices of native speakers’ essays and those of language learners, it is observed that, compared with essays written by Chinese learners, those written by Korean learners are more cohesive and closer to those written by native speakers. This phenomenon can be attributed to the similarities between Korean and Japanese. This discovery enhances the theory of language transfer by providing empirical evidence from discourse cohesion in the essays written by foreign language learners from China and Korea.

Through a semantic processing task priming paradigm, this research investigates the priming effects of the matching task of macro-categories on micro-category in metaphor processing, hence taking an insight into the realization mechanism of metaphorical categorization. The result shows that in the semantic structure mapping task, even without being explicitly demanded to recognize the category relation between the topic and the vehicle, the shortened reaction time to category associated target demonstrated that the mapping task activated the category association between the topic and the vehicle, yet the same priming effect was not found in pure semantic associating task. In contrast to pure semantic associating task, the priming effect of the mapping task exerted on category target indicates that the categorization of the topic and the vehicle is based on the structural mapping between the semantic relations involving the topic and the vehicle and the corresponding objects. This study provides further empirical evidence for the first-matching-later-projecting model in metaphorical categorization.

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.

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.

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.

The ethics of difference in translation advocates confrontational foreignization to resist cultural hegemony, narcissism and the unequal status of language and culture. It has similar evaluation criteria and value system with faithfulness, as in translation practice, only flexible use of various strategies can achieve the ethical goal and faithful results. However, the ethic of difference was far from perfect at the early stage of its construction, and in its development, there have also been problems such as blurred application boundaries, pursuit of utilitarianism, and inadequate attention to practical considerations. Therefore, the analysis of ethics of difference should be strictly controlled and used according to multiple dimensions such as ideology and practice orientation, to facilitate critical reform, so as to promote the continuous development of translation ethics research. Based on a critique of the ethical thinking of Berman and Venuti, this paper explores ways to improve the theoretical system and practical application of the ethics of difference. In order to meet the needs of translation research and cross-cultural translation and publication, the improvement of the theoretical system of ethics of differences needs clarification of the degree between alienation and naturalization, de-emphasis of ideological attributes, and close integration with specific translation practice.

Speech acts constitute one of the fundamental units of human communication, and investigations based on authentic language data are indispensable for uncovering their underlying mechanisms. However, canonical corpus-based approaches based on formal search suffer from notable limitations due to the non-correspondence between pragmatic functions and linguistic forms. With the advancement of natural language processing, digital intelligence techniques have opened up new avenues for addressing the long-standing problem of the form-function mismatch in speech acts. This paper reviews the major developments in speech act research within both corpus linguistics and natural language processing, and highlights the synergetic potential between the two. Moreover, large language model technologies are expected to serve as one of the mainstream empirical methodologies in future pragmatics research.

At present, the Country-and-Area Studies (CAS), listed as a major urgently needed by the national strategy, have received the extensive attention in higher education. It is suggested, however, that the discipline of Foreign Linguistics and Literature (FLL) should avoid rushing into action regardless of its own weaknesses and limitations. The CAS aim to serve the country’s foreign political and economic diplomatic strategies, which require the disciplinary knowledge of politics, economics, history, sociology, jurisprudence and anthropology. Obviously, FLL could not be easily qualified for it. What we can do is to cooperate with scholars of the discipline of International Relations and conduct the studies in the aspects of culture, literature and linguistics which are our strength. Culture, reflected in novels, could inform us of a country’s government system, economic models and ideological beliefs. Apart from literature, we could also find the attitudes of the target government through the texts of government reports, political speeches and news reports by using corpus-based critical discourse analysis.

Previous studies on interrupting have paid little attention to its dynamic generating mechanism. This paper, taking assistance-type cooperative interrupting as the research object, has made a comprehensive interpretation of how it is generated from the perspective of relevance theory and politeness principle. It is found that assistance-type cooperative interrupting is a verbally communicative behavior in which the interrupter, governed by the politeness principle, assists the interrupted person in conveying communicative information and intention based on the assumed understanding inferred. This process entails two pragmatic manifestations: 1) the awareness of participating, namely, confirming the conversational topic initiated by the interrupted person; 2) the awareness of caring for others’ needs, namely, satisfying the transactional motivations of the interrupted person. This study deepens the understanding of interrupting, which can provide inspiration for future research.

Against the backdrop of the profound transformation brought about by artificial intelligence, five scholars engage in an in-depth discussion on pathways for innovation and development in the discipline of foreign languages and literatures. They argue that while remaining committed to the fundamental mission of language and culture education, the discipline should actively harness digital and intelligent technologies to expand research paradigms and pedagogical approaches. By promoting interdisciplinary integration through the “foreign languages plus” model, deepening country and area studies, and cultivating composite talents equipped with humanistic literacy, digital competence, and a global vision, the discipline can better meet contemporary demands. The scholars emphasize that foreign language studies must proactively align with national strategies, enhance international communication and narrative capacity, and ultimately contribute irreplaceable Chine

On May 10, 2025, the Eighth Discipline Review Group for Foreign Languages and Literatures of the Academic Degrees Committee of the State Council convened the Symposium on Innovation and Development of Foreign Languages and Literatures in the Digital-Intelligent Era in Chengdu. The meeting reviewed the discipline’s significant role in serving national strategies and promoting intercultural exchange, and reached four major consensuses in response to the opportunities and challenges brought by emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. These include strengthening the disciplinary mission to advance the construction of China’s independent knowledge system; seizing digital-intelligent opportunities to innovate research paradigms and talent cultivation models; leveraging multilingual strengths to enhance the international communication effectiveness of Chinese narratives; and deepening country and area studies to contribute Chinese perspectives and wisdom to global governance. The meeting called on the discipline to actively respond to the demands of the times and to demonstrate its irreplaceable value.

National language security is a key component of holistic national security, yet existing researches have generally failed to conduct an in-depth exploration of these issues and their characteristics. To address this gap, this paper first clarifies the definition and basic scope of national language security, then takes “National Security and Defence Dataset” as the research object to comprehensively explore the characteristics and develops a model to address national language security issues. The study finds that military language competence and the implementation of official language policies are among the core concerns of national language security. These issues collectively form a complex model encompassing status planning, corpus planning, acquisition planning, and discourse planning. The exploration of national language security issues and model construction may help provide theoretical insights and practical references to improve holistic national language security capabilities.

CHEN Jingrong translated Baudelaire’s “Spleen IV” three times. The first translation was published in a period of criticism of “decadent literature”. CHEN took the initiative to reduce the intensity of spleen and the color of decadence. The second translation was published after the foundation of People’s Republic of China. CHEN transformed the translation according to the characteristics of revolutionary poetry and strengthened the combativeness of the poem to serve social realities. The third translation was published in the environment of Reform and Opening-up and intellectual emancipation. CHEN shifted from focusing on the utility of the poems to focusing on the artistic form of the poems. The course of her three translations of “Spleen IV” reflects the trend of change from utilitarianism to respect for the text, representing that translation strategies are closely related to changes in social and cultural environments.

Metaphor, as a cognitive mechanism, plays a key role in the translation process, giving rise to the Metaphor Translation Theory. This paper attempts to explore the thinking approach and operational mechanism behind English translation of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) discourse based on the Metaphor Translation Theory. The results demonstrate that target language (English translation) creation can be interpreted as a metaphorical process whereby the translator pursues cross-domain mapping, searching or establishing resemblance, relation, and correspondence between source language (TCM discourse) and target language variables across slots, relations, attributes and knowledge. This is done with comprehensive consideration of factors such as highlighting, coherence, cultural differences, and innovative spirit, in an attempt to identify appropriate translation methods that balance retaining Chinese cultural elements and target reader acceptance.

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.

Despite notable advancements in artificial intelligence in the domains of common-sense reasoning and semantic understanding, achieving effective mutual understanding in human-machine interactions remains a significant challenge. Drawing on Conversation Analysis as the theoretical foundation, this paper conceptualizes human-machine interaction as a specialized branch of social interaction, and examines the pivotal role of Conversation Analysis in human-machine interaction research, focusing on three core aspects: the role of temporality and participants, anticipations in mutual understanding, the relationship between sequentiality and intersubjectivity, and the application of multimodal conversation analysis in this field. Finally, this paper proposes targeted implications of Conversation Analysis for the design, evaluation, and refinement of conversational systems.

Wilhelm Gesenius was a renowned professor at the University of Halle in Germany and a specialist in various oriental languages. At the end of 1822, he happened to get acquainted with two young Cantonese sailors who were traveling in Germany. He came up with the idea of establishing Sinology as a scientific discipline in Germany with their assistance. Under the support of the Prussian authorities, the two Chinese were placed under the supervision of Gesenius, who paired them with two German doctors. The plan was for the Germans to learn Chinese and for the Chinese to learn German over the course of three years. Unfortunately, this experiment failed to produce the expected results. Nevertheless, it is regarded as the earliest verifiable attempt at mutual language instruction between Chinese and German, which is of cultural-historical significance. Based on primary archival sources, this paper examines the causes and effects of this relatively unknown historical event.

Based on the concepts of “role identity”, “group identity” and “person identity” in social psychology, this paper tries to find out the role identities of the co-translators and the group identities aggregated from different roles. It is found that the Chinese and foreign scientific and technological co-translators in the Ming and Qing dynasties were mainly foreign missionaries and local literati intellectuals, and the main sponsors were the missionary societies and government agencies. It is further found that scientific and technological co-translation in the Ming and Qing dynasties showed a tendency from being driven by private interactions to being driven by specific goals, from the passive participation of translators to their active initiation, and from the folk workshop mode to the government- sponsored mode. The sorting out of the identities of these scientific and technological co-translators helps to present the nature of Sino-foreign co-translation in the two dynasties, and to pave the way for further studies on the co- translation groups and the behavior of co-translators.

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.

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.

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.

This paper addresses the proposition of the “Golden Ratio” in translation practice, which has been proposed by some scholars from the perspective of translator behavior criticism (TBC) theory. It delves into several issues, including the relationship between “truth-seeking” and “utility-attaining” as opposed to “dead translation” and “creativity,” the maintenance of a dynamic balance between “truth-seeking” and “utility-attaining,” and the establishment of the “Golden Ratio” range in translation practice. The Golden Ratio is a metaphor for the optimal state of translation. It is a theoretical issue related to translation practice and falls within the scope of translation criticism. This paper lays the foundation for objectively conducting translation criticism and reasonably enhancing translation practice. It also strengthens the component of guiding translation practice and translation criticism practice in the development of translator behavior criticism theory.

This study adopts Hofstede’s cultural dimensions to test four large language models (ChatGPT-4, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Ernie 4.0, and Deepseek-R1) across Chinese and American cultural contexts with Chinese and English prompts. Through 16 experimental conditions and 16,000 samples, it analyzes the cultural tendencies of LLMs. Findings reveal that LLMs can reflect macro cultural differences between China and the U.S., but their representation of American cultural values remains more stable across languages, while representation of Chinese culture is more language-dependent and variable. Model outputs differ substantially from real human data, with higher alignment when simulating American culture. The study discusses the alignment between generative artificial intelligence and human language culture and its implications for multicultural ecology and intercultural understanding.

By analyzing the results of a word association test and a controlled productive vocabulary test of EFL learners from three successive grades, the current research investigated the correlation between the organization of mental lexicon and the development of EFL Learners’ productive vocabulary. The results showed that: (1) The syntagmatic associations in different stages increased significantly and the productive vocabulary had shown a significant development trend between the second and third grade; (2) The productive vocabulary was positively related with paradigmatic association in the first grade and with world knowledge association in the second grade; (3) Generally speaking, the combination of different types of word association and, specifically, the syntagmatic associations had predictive effects on the development of productive vocabulary.

Based on corpus, this paper analyzes the diplomatic discourses of Ukraine and Russia to explore how proximization strategies are employed to legitimize their discourses and uncover the underlying reasons. The study reveals that spatially, Ukraine’s diplomatic discourse exhibits a stronger spatial-proximization-dominated feature than Russia’s, with both constructing distinct IDCs and ODCs. Temporally, Russia’s diplomatic discourse emphasizes “past-present” temporal proximization, while Ukraine’s discourse highlights the “future-present” span. Axiologically, Ukraine rationalizes its discourse through values of “regularity” and “westernization”, whereas Russia underscores justice rooted in “historical”values. Differences in interest selection within communicative games and variations in social cognitive perceptions of national identity may account for the distinct proximization features in the diplomatic discourses of the two sides. The findings may reveal the ideological drivers behind discourse legitimization and shed light on the interactions between discourse, power and social reality.

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.

Based on the national policy guidelines for country and region studies in terms of disciplinary setting, scientific research, and talents cultivation, this paper firstly analyzes the connotation of regionology and country and region studies and puts forward nine core features of regionology. Secondly, it proposes six essential elements for constructing a regionology system with Chinese characteristics: building a disciplinary knowledge system, highlighting locally situated knowledge clusters while constructing a world-oriented social knowledge structure, developing universal theories and establishing a cross-disciplinary knowledge framework, serving the exchange and mutual learning among world civilizations with research objects that must encompass the globe, constructing a body of knowledge shared by all humanity, and adopting problem-oriented, integrated, project-based research. Finally, the paper presents ten key components for talents cultivation, including key countries, key languages, key fields, key knowledge, key methods, key competencies, key perspectives, key processes, key resources, and key curricula.

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.

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.

This study employs Conversation Analysis (CA) as the theoretical framework and adopts a quasi- experimental design to explore the effects of CA-based instruction on enhancing classroom interactional competence among college English learners. The experimental group (n = 45) and the control group (n = 41) received systematic CA training and conventional instruction, respectively. After a 16-week teaching experiment, the experimental group demonstrated significant improvements in the contribution of short response tokens and adjacency pairs, along with a reduction in average turn length, indicating a preference for economical interaction strategies. Although the increase in the contribution of assessment was not statistically significant, its upward trend suggested enhanced complexity in evaluative expressions. The findings confirm that CA instruction optimizes interaction quality. Future research should integrate multimodal technologies to further investigate the dynamic mechanisms of interactional competence development.

Using Large Language Models (LLMs), this study conducts a systematic analysis of the distribution characteristics of common English verbs in transitivity processes and their corresponding usages, aiming to demonstrate the complex nature of language as an organic semiotic system. Research findings reveal a distinct macro-level asymmetry in the distribution of common verbs across material, mental, and relational processes. Notably, verbs that realize material processes are predominant. In the realization of processes, English common verbs exhibit a core periphery distribution: verbs that realize material processes occupy the core, whereas those that realize relational processes are predominantly peripheral. Non-core meanings of verbs primarily originate from material processes, followed by mental processes, with relational processes contributing the least. Furthermore, approximately 80% of verbs predominantly realize a single process type, whereas around 20% demonstrate combined usage. The Pareto-style imbalance exhibited by English common verbs in their transitivity processes serves as a microcosm of language as an organic symbolic system. It specifically embodies multiple traits of the system, such as wholeness, dynamics, nonlinearity (emergence and uncertainty), asymmetry, adaptability, and evolvability. This precisely indicates that language systems are simultaneously shaped by both universal biological laws and social-cultural 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.

The fragmentation of the media environment, coupled with the diversification of international audiences, needs, has opened up new dimensions in the study of translation reception. Meanwhile, the penetration and integration of digital technologies have facilitated substantive and multifaceted negotiations between translated works and their mass readership. Utilizing online review data from English translations of contemporary Chinese novels (2000-2024), this study examines the focal points of mass readers, evaluations. Supplemented by a needs analysis, it explores the mechanisms through which various reader demands influence overall reception outcomes. The findings indicate that a hierarchy of translation reader needs, constructed on the basis of big data, can dynamically adapt to the identification of readers, multidimensional requirements across diverse contexts. Furthermore, a digital intelligence-driven approach to analyzing and optimizing the overseas reception of literary translations not only paves the way for more feasible methodologies in translation reception studies but also provides valuable insights for the strategic allocation of translation resources, which contributes to the leap from “going global” to “going in” for contemporary Chinese literature.

From the perspective of critical thinking, this paper explores the path of ideological-political education in the course of Introduction to Linguistics focusing on three aspects: principles, framework and evaluation. First, in terms of the principles, the ideological-political education of the course Introduction to Linguistics should organically combine the core constituent elements of critical thinking with the concept identification, concept judgment and concept construction within the course. Second, in terms of the framework, it should focus on the comprehensive integration of critical thinking into the teaching objectives, teaching content and teaching methods. Third, in terms of the evaluation, it should start from the dual course subjects of teachers and students, to promote the sustainable development of the ideological-political education in the course through the transformation of the concepts of teaching and learning.

The macro constructs of disciplinary English consist disciplinary contents and English language, whose interface and fusion mechanism at the micro-level are explored hereby from the “event domain” : English language constructs disciplinary contents into knowledge in an academic way, which is held in this paper to be the substantive cross-interface within disciplinary English. Resting upon this interface are layer of grammatical construction, layer of disciplinary knowledge construction and layer of disciplinary feature construction. Disciplinary contents are constructed through English language into knowledge at each of the three layers that constitute a three- dimensional construction mechanism of organic fusion in general.

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.