Face is a deep-rooted concept for interactants to consider in interactions, and it is even more inportant when interactants are involved in a face-threatening act, such as request. Request could threaten the face of the requester and/or the requestee, considering the fact that a request could infringe or impose on the freedom of action of the requestee and threaten the requestee’s negative face while the requestee’s refusing a request could damage the requester’s positive face. Many pragmatic researches have probed into the strategies that communicators could adopt to do face threatening acts. The present research, taking conversation analysis as the research methodology, investigates the conversational practices that interactants could adopt to make requests. For example, requests could be accounted for by the requester, turns can be designed to discount the cost to the requestee, something could be given in return, and pre-sequences might be used to delay the occurrence of a request or even trigger an offer. The conversational practices that a requester adopts sufficiently explain that requests are endogenously understood by both the requester and requestee as a face-threatening act which is a dispreferred initiative action in nature. The present research is based on the interactional concept of politeness and the procedural approach to face.

Rhetorical competence is an important component of western rhetorical theories. Few studies have been carried out on the core elements of rhetorical competence up to now, though it is widely discussed among rhetoricians. In this paper, the author argues that rhetorical competence can be viewed as an inner attribute of rhetors, namely, the sum of rhetors’ abilities to successfully make a rhetorical act. Thus, it encompasses a wide range of elements. To figure out the theoretical framework of rhetorical competence, the author makes an attempt to define its concept by examining the scope of classical and new rhetoric, as “rhetoric” is an essential element in rhetorical competence. On the basis of the concept of rhetoric, rhetor, rhetorical object, rhetorical situation, rhetorical strategy, and rhetorical purpose are crucial factors in defining rhetorical competence. On the basis of those five parameters, the author attempts to give the definitions of rhetorical competence in classical rhetoric and new rhetoric respectively, and thus to generalize the basic concept of rhetorical competence. Moreover, clarification of the concept of rhetorical competence can shed light on the way to promote research on foreign language competence as well as national rhetorical competence.

As a new discipline, critical discourse analysis (CDA) has made remarkable achievements, with more and more scholars devoting themselves to this interdisciplinary field of research worldwide. The major difference between CDA and other traditional discourse analysis approaches lies in the term “critical”, which presupposes researchers’ overt political positions and strong social concern. However, this presupposition has been questioned and deemed as problematic by many scholars who give priority to objectivity in research. This paper first explores the core concept of CDA, criticism, and points out CDA’s orientation to social problems. As a new discipline, CDA inevitably has some problems and limitations. However, one of the most important aspects of CDA is its openness. On this basis, this paper tries to sort out the latest developments in CDA. This paper discusses scholars’ criticisms of CDA in detail, together with CDA practitioners’ responses. Informed by diverse disciplines and theories, CDA does not provide a unified and systematic analytic framework. Scholars’ critiques have been targeted at both CDA’s theories and methods, specifically roles played by researchers and participants, linguistic theories employed, text analysis, data selection, context, etc. Some criticisms can be attributed to the different epistemological stances held by researchers and their different research traditions and backgrounds. Others like selective interpretation of researchers and participants’ reaction to texts are common problems in arts and humanities. However, problems and limitations are inevitable in the early stage of any discipline. When viewed more positively, it indicates great potential for CDA’s future development. Subsequently, this paper discusses new developments in CDA, namely corpus-based CDA, cognitive CDA, ethnography-informed CDA and positive discourse analysis (PDA). As responses to the problems presented previously by scholars, these developments not only enrich CDA’s analytic tools but also enhance its interpretive power, rendering its research results more convincing.

Based on the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s Field Theory and its key notions of field, habitus and capital, the paper explores the process of English translation, publication and communication of the novel The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, the English version of Chang Hen Ge which is a representative novel written by the famous Chinese female writer Wang Anyi. Then a brief introduction is given to Wang Anyi’s habitus of “depicting Shanghai” and her capital accumulation in the literature field, and to the translator Michael Berry’s translation habitus and the accumulation of different forms of capital in the translation field. The findings are as follows: First, this process of translation, publication and communication is accompanied with the interplay and conflict of interest among various participants in the translation field such as the author, the translator, the book critics and the publishing house. Second, the translator’s habitus and capital play an essential role in the process, as he adopts the translation strategy of foreignization to preserve the writing style of the original novel and the Shanghai regional culture, which is well illustrated with translation examples. Sticking to the spirit of the original novel and resisting the vulgar temptation of the pecuniary gains, the translator makes a successful translation, thus contributing to the communication of Shanghai regional culture portrayed in the original novel.

It is generally held that the establishment of Lin Shu’s translator identity and Lin’s translated fiction brand are attributable to lucky coincidences or personal endowments. This article, however, investigates the social and historical reasons for his great success from the patron perspective by relying on data analysis and text comparison. The article finds that a wide range of patronage-givers performed collaborative but various functions at the different stages or in different aspects of the same stage in his translation career. And the patronage-givers consisted of the social personages at that time, his interpreters, the persons who represented the Tongcheng School and facilitated the New Cultural Movement and diverse publishers. The personages and the publishers then conducted the economy-related functions as his economic patrons, the interpreters and the reformers shaped his translation views as his ideological patrons, and the persons from Tongcheng School and New Cultural Movement controlled the poetics-oriented factors in his translations as his poetological patrons. Seen in this way, those patrons not only played an indispensable role in his earnings, his attitudes towards translation, and his status as a translator, but also made a remarkable contribution to his choice of texts to be translated, and the publication and publication volume of his translations.

Female Chinese Americans grow up in multi-heterogeneous environments formed by gender, ethnic, linguistic, cultural and other elements, which are reflected in the works of female Chinese American writers. In order to explore how female Chinese American writers adopt growth narrative as a means to represent those painful growing-up experiences of female Chinese Americans, this paper conducts a close reading of three representative female writers’ works from different periods in Chinese American literary history, including Fifth Chinese Daughter by Jade Snow Wong, The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston and Bone by Fae Myenne Ng. By digging up the deeply hidden growing-up history of female Chinese Americans within the works mentioned above, it turns out that female Chinese American writers successfully create a vivid female Chinese imagery serial which corresponds to growing-up experiences of female Chinese in different periods. In this way, these female Chinese American writers reveal a process of diachronic evolution of female Chinese Americans’ subjectivity construction. Owing to different backgrounds and individual diversity, these three writers’ growth narratives are quite different from each other, which not only complies with the requirement of gender expression, but also demonstrates the influence of time and culture.

Communication involves both information exchange and relationship building. Based on studies on politeness and face, Spencer-Oatey puts forward the rapport management theory, which has been widely used in research on intercultural communication, pragmatics and intercultural business communication. This paper applies genre analysis to the email discourses collected and explores, within the theoretical framework of rapport management, the impact of contextual, social and individual factors on rapport management as well as the use of rapport management strategy in intercultural communication. The research shows that effective rapport management depends on mutual sensitivity and on each interlocutor finding an appropriate balance between meeting their own needs and the needs of others. In intercultural interaction, participants not only have to develop a keen awareness of contextual factors, including interaction goals and the nature of the communicative activity, but also individual factors, including participant relations, the rights and obligations of people’s roles, and face sensitivity. More importantly, individual factors should be given due consideration, including emotion regulation and stylistic flexibility. The former relates to the competence to handle criticism or embarrassment and to get along with people who hold different views and values; the latter relates to the competence to make use of a wide range of linguistic options each language provides for managing rapport. It’s hoped that the research may enable us to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the factors that influence people’s dynamic judgment or rapport, which is essential to understanding the problems that occur in intercultural interaction and to approaching these problems with efficient rapport management skills.

Based on a survey on the interaction of classroom teaching and teaching-related research, conducted among 273 language teachers from institutions of higher learning in 24 cities/provinces in China, the article aims to discuss the current problems language teachers face as well as the possible solutions they can work out within the framework of action research. The results show that these language teachers, especially the young teachers working in big cities and highly-rated universities, are heavily loaded with teaching tasks and are simultaneously facing much pressure for academic achievements. Two serious problems troubling a large number of teachers are how teaching and research can be integrated well and how classroom-related studies can be carried out scientifically. The study hence proposes the approach of “research-guided teaching and classroom-based research”, which enables teachers to have more initiatives for the improvement of teaching and as a result to actively seek solutions to the problems in classroom. Moreover, through efficient team cooperation, teachers can successfully enhance the efficiency and quality of their research in classroom teaching. When teaching and research can nurture each other soundly, teachers can have more access to professional development.

Learning community has become a new way of learning, and online learning community provides a new approach for college English reading. Based on the theories of constructivism and connectivism, the study explores college English reading course both in theory and in practice. A model of online learning community for college English reading class was firstly proposed, and then implemented in pedagogical practice for one semester among a college English teacher and the students who had passed CET 4. The teacher first instructed the students to collect and select suitable learning materials on the Internet. Then, the students divided their work, read the selected materials in depth and made slides to assist with their oral presentation in class. At the stage of class report, the teacher guided the students to interact and share with each other their thoughts and encouraged them to reflect upon their own reading habit, thus laying foundation for further study. Students’ feedback reflected a certain degree of improvement in terms of learner autonomy and cooperation, proving the validity and effectiveness of the model proposed. This study provides a useful reference for the follow-up college English curriculum reform.

Ecolingusitics is an umbrella term which is concerned with the interaction between language and ecology, covering topics from language diversity, language endangerment and language revitalization to ecological discourse analysis. There are two main complementary strands within this field: Haugenian approach and Hallidayan approach. Haugenian approach, also known as language/linguistic ecology, favors the study of the co-existence of languages whether in human minds or human societies and the protection and enhancement of the status of minority or endangered languages, which aims to preserve linguistic diversity, while Hallidayan approach, known as ecological linguistics, addresses the question of how language construes our view of nature and environment, and explores the role of language and discourse in describing, concealing and helping to solve ecological and environmental problems. As the first comprehensive exploration into this interdisciplinary and relatively new field, The Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics (2017) not only provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art, past and present of ecolinguistics through in-depth discussion of diverse topics by leading international scholars, but also concludes with a discussion on what new orientations ecolinguistics will have and which trends will be investigated more profoundly in the future, which shed light on the leading ideas, topics, approaches and research methodologies in ecolinguistics. This book is a tremendous asset, provides much tasty food for thought and offers an excellent work of reference to researchers and postgraduate students interested in ecolinguistics, language ecology and ecological discourse analysis. The present article attempts to make a brief review and evaluation of this monograph in the hope of offering invaluable insights into domestic ecolinguistic studies.