Writing centers in U.S. colleges and universities help students improve their writing skills with unique operational and tutorial models,which have been globally promoted. However,the English writing education of the colleges and universities in China is not so well developed and only a small portion of universities have established English writing centers to provide tutoring services. Under the construction of the New Liberal Arts in China, the colleges and universities in China need to pay attention to personalized English writing tutoring services and to cultivate international talents. This paper reviews the theoretical bases, operation modes and characteristics of the English writing center for the past three decades, makes a comprehensive summary according to different research topics,and proposes the suggestions on the construction and development of English writing centers in China.
An important way to build “double world-class” medical universities is to improve students’ medical English quality. Based on the practice of medical English teaching in a medical university in Fujian Province, this study focuses on the implementation and evaluation of medical English teaching that integrates content-based instruction and project-based learning. There are four implementation approaches: optimizing teaching content with medical knowledge as the core, designing content-based projects for medical students, constructing project scenarios out of authentic language materials and evaluating the projects and the course with content-based tests. Through a questionnaire survey and semistructured interviews, it is found that the teaching of this course has positive effects on students’ knowledge acquisition, competence improvement and quality cultivation. The study may provide reference for the improvement of medical English course teaching.
The paper summarizes the methodological assumptions of cognitive grammar into “six phases”: phases of observation, data collection, theoretical development, validation, comparison and formalization, and five principles, i.e. factuality, economy, explicitness, generality and predictiveness. The methods in cognitive grammar prove to be a unification of empirical and theoretical methods, an integration of systemic and analytical methods and an association of specific analysis with abstract generalizations. The methodological principles of cognitive grammar turn out to be the one with dialectical thinking as its guide, and characteristics of sticking to the law of the unity of opposites and combining research subject with research object.
Contextual metaphor refers to the phenomen on where one genresymbolizes another. This study examines multimodal contextual metaphor and attempts to develop a four-dimensional analytical frame work underpinned by Systemic Functional Linguistics.A political cartoon is then analyzed to verify the frame work as well as to look in to the mechanism of multimodal contextual metaphor.It is found that the six meaning-corresponding strategies, including double-coding, imitating and symbolizing representational meaning, appraisal transfer, interactional mapping, and compositional parasitizing, facilitate the realization of a surface genre and a symbolized genre. The surface genre is characterized by a typical mode, whose generic structure is not completely presented, while the symbolized one features an untypical mode, whose generic structure is fully presented. A multimodal contextual metaphor blends features of both the surface genre and the symbolized genre, which further expands the meaning potential.
Xu Guangqi was a preeminent scitech translator in the late Ming Dynasty while Li Shanlan was his counterpart in the late Qing Dynasty. Although living in totally different historical periods, they did contribute to the dissemination of Western learning in China with Western science and culture at its core, which had an influence on both that time and later ages.Based on sorting out the historical materials regarding Xu’s and Li’s translations of Ji He Yuan Ben, this article finds out the similarities in their translation skopos, text selection principles,organizing patterns and translation features, and explores the causes for such similarities from historical, geographic, and individual perspectives,to see how Xu and Li have made dialogues with each other across time and space via translating distinct parts of the same book. This article aims to promote translation studies of Ji He Yuan Ben and studies on the two sci-tech translators Xu Guangqi and Li Shanlan.
