Wen Xu – författare

This book explores and analyses Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) pedagogic practices and learning experiences within a cohort of low socio-economic status students within an Australian primary classroom. It demonstrates that, in spite of policy and educational discourses underpinning ‘Asian literacies’, Chinese teaching and learning is a fragile undertaking in Australian schooling. The politicisation of CFL education, especially in the post COVID-19 era, has exacerbated public stereotypes concerning racism and multiculturalism in Australia today.

Drawing upon Bernstein’s theorisation and engagement framework, Wen Xu sketches out CFL education as a democratic space where power and control relations can be deliberately operated to reinforce engaging learning experiences. She suggests that pedagogic interventions in the name of social justice have the potential to make consequential differences in disadvantaged students’ life trajectories, and CFL education can be envisioned as an avenue towards socioeconomic mobility instead of being criticised as a platform opposing to liberal ideas. In turn, she provides insights into teaching younger age CFL learners in the global context, in terms of the structuring of pedagogy and curriculum.

Wen Xu’s research will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology of education, student engagement, pedagogy and curriculum, CFL education and languages education, as well as pre-service teachers and practitioners who teach Chinese as a Foreign Language.

This book explores and analyses Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) pedagogic practices and learning experiences within a cohort of low socio-economic status students within an Australian primary classroom. It demonstrates that, in spite of policy and educational discourses underpinning ‘Asian literacies’, Chinese teaching and learning is a fragile undertaking in Australian schooling. The politicisation of CFL education, especially in the post COVID-19 era, has exacerbated public stereotypes concerning racism and multiculturalism in Australia today.

Drawing upon Bernstein’s theorisation and engagement framework, Wen Xu sketches out CFL education as a democratic space where power and control relations can be deliberately operated to reinforce engaging learning experiences. She suggests that pedagogic interventions in the name of social justice have the potential to make consequential differences in disadvantaged students’ life trajectories, and CFL education can be envisioned as an avenue towards socioeconomic mobility instead of being criticised as a platform opposing to liberal ideas. In turn, she provides insights into teaching younger age CFL learners in the global context, in terms of the structuring of pedagogy and curriculum.

Wen Xu’s research will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology of education, student engagement, pedagogy and curriculum, CFL education and languages education, as well as pre-service teachers and practitioners who teach Chinese as a Foreign Language.

The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics provides a comprehensive introduction and essential reference work to cognitive linguistics. It encompasses a wide range of perspectives and approaches, covering all the key areas of cognitive linguistics and drawing on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research in pragmatics, discourse analysis, biolinguistics, ecolinguistics, evolutionary linguistics, neuroscience, language pedagogy, and translation studies.

The forty-three chapters, written by international specialists in the field, cover four major areas:

• Basic theories and hypotheses, including cognitive semantics, cognitive grammar, construction grammar, frame semantics, natural semantic metalanguage, and word grammar;

• Central topics, including embodiment, image schemas, categorization, metaphor and metonymy, construal, iconicity, motivation, constructionalization, intersubjectivity, grounding, multimodality, cognitive pragmatics, cognitive poetics, humor, and linguistic synaesthesia, among others;

• Interfaces between cognitive linguistics and other areas of linguistic study, including cultural linguistics, linguistic typology, figurative language, signed languages, gesture, language acquisition and pedagogy, translation studies, and digital lexicography;

• New directions in cognitive linguistics, demonstrating the relevance of the approach to social, diachronic, neuroscientific, biological, ecological, multimodal, and quantitative studies.

The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics is an indispensable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, and for all researchers working in this area.

The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics provides a comprehensive introduction and essential reference work to cognitive linguistics. It encompasses a wide range of perspectives and approaches, covering all the key areas of cognitive linguistics and drawing on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research in pragmatics, discourse analysis, biolinguistics, ecolinguistics, evolutionary linguistics, neuroscience, language pedagogy, and translation studies.

The forty-three chapters, written by international specialists in the field, cover four major areas:

• Basic theories and hypotheses, including cognitive semantics, cognitive grammar, construction grammar, frame semantics, natural semantic metalanguage, and word grammar;

• Central topics, including embodiment, image schemas, categorization, metaphor and metonymy, construal, iconicity, motivation, constructionalization, intersubjectivity, grounding, multimodality, cognitive pragmatics, cognitive poetics, humor, and linguistic synaesthesia, among others;

• Interfaces between cognitive linguistics and other areas of linguistic study, including cultural linguistics, linguistic typology, figurative language, signed languages, gesture, language acquisition and pedagogy, translation studies, and digital lexicography;

• New directions in cognitive linguistics, demonstrating the relevance of the approach to social, diachronic, neuroscientific, biological, ecological, multimodal, and quantitative studies.

The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics is an indispensable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, and for all researchers working in this area.

This self-contained book describes social influence from a computational point of view, with a focus on recent and practical applications, models, algorithms and open topics for future research. Researchers, scholars, postgraduates and developers interested in research on social networking and the social influence related issues will find this book useful and motivating. The latest research on social computing is presented along with and illustrations on how to understand and manipulate social influence for knowledge discovery by applying various data mining techniques in real world scenarios. Experimental reports, survey papers, models and algorithms with specific optimization problems are depicted. The main topics covered in this book are: chrematistics of social networks, modeling of social influence propagation, popular research problems in social influence analysis such as influence maximization, rumor blocking, rumor source detection, and multiple social influence competing.  

These proceedings are a collection of 16 selected scientific papers and reviews by distinguished international experts that were presented at the 4th Pacific Rim Underwater Acoustics Conference (PRUAC), held in Hangzhou, China in October 2013. The topics discussed at the conference include internal wave observation and prediction; environmental uncertainty and coupling to sound propagation; environmental noise and ocean dynamics; dynamic modeling in acoustic fields; acoustic tomography and ocean parameter estimation; time reversal and matched field processing; underwater acoustic localization and communication as well as measurement instrumentations and platforms. These proceedings provide insights into the latest developments in underwater acoustics, promoting the exchange of ideas for the benefit of future research.

This book explores African international students’ lived experience within Chinese higher education, including their language ideologies, investment in Chinese language learning and the (re)shaping of identities and aspirations. Whilst high English proficiency has been sought by globally mobile students to play the ‘class game’ and gain entrée to the circle of elites, considerably less attention has been paid to how shifting global structures and China’s semi-peripheral position shape its language learners’ investment and identity construction. Drawing upon a series of interviews, the book deciphers African students’ logics of linguistic exchanges within the geopolitical and geo-economic context of China-African relations. The students invested heavily into Chinese language learning and use, while displaying perfectionism, linguistic entrepreneurship and linguistic insecurity. As the value of their Chinese linguistic capital increases, they reassessed their sense of themselves and produced different social identities, which includes the idea of ‘the world is my oyster’, contributing to Africa’s sustainable development and the disposition to ‘tell China’s story well’. This work transgresses monolingual dominance (i.e. English) in the existing body of international student mobility and second language acquisition (SLA) research, as great importance is assigned to Chinese as linguistic capital in South-South student migration. The book is of interest to researchers in international higher education, international student mobilities, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, languages education, and Chinese language teaching and learning.