Any news on English education in China today is now no news, but this most recent one may offer us some fresh food for thought.

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This article examines the discursive construction of a specific letter-style multilingual crisis message released by local governmental institutions during China’s battle against the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a sociocognitive analysis of a collection of 33 English-language messages, the analysis revealed the structural features of the message and the discursive strategies in constructing and negotiating the identities of the message’s addresser and the addressee. It was found that the discursive relationship between the addresser and the addressee was established on an ingroup-outgroup distinction mediated by neutralising strategies to reduce authoritative imposition and image-enhancing strategies to promote a responsible government. The findings suggest that multilingual crisis communication is a multivocal, complex social practice shaped by genre, textual, media and contextual factors. These findings will provide insights into the crisis discourse as an emerging topic of interest and help inform multilingual communication strategies in and beyond the context of a public health emergency.

Technologically enhanced means and devices in language education and research have enabled an in-depth exploration of the dynamics of writing. This study investigated the pausing behaviour of eight Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners at the tertiary level in performing an online writing task. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected using a combination of methods and techniques, including keystroke logging, screen recording videos, think-aloud protocols, and stimulated recall interviews to establish a profile of each learner’s pausing behaviour. The learners’ pause profiles were extensively analyzed with a comparative focus on similarities and differences in EFL learners’ pausing behaviour across writing skill levels. Overall, the findings revealed a general tendency for the learners to pause most frequently at a low text unit level, i.e., the lexical level. More specifically, less-skilled writers tended to pause more frequently than more-skilled writers at lower-level text units, whilst more-skilled writers chose to make more strategic pauses to gain overall control of their writing. Furthermore, these findings help reveal the intricate self-monitoring patterns that undergird individual writer’s pausing behaviour and relate these patterns to self-monitoring awareness, writing knowledge and experience, and writing habit. This small-scale multi-method study offers a glimpse into how EFL learners at different skill levels would respond to a real-time online writing task by using resources at their disposal and under conscious monitoring. Methodologically, it adds empirical evidence to previous literature on researching the computer-aided writing process with computer-aided tools and considers productive complementation and triangulation across research approaches and paradigms.

As scholarly publishing continues to expand its international dimension in the globalizing era, authors in non-Anglophone contexts today are increasingly confronted with the decision to publish nationally or internationally. Linguistic challenges aside, such a decision is complicated by the tension between local interests and international solidarity with changing conventions of scholarly publishing in the national context. This study investigated one facet of this tension by comparing national and international publishing activities in the humanities and social sciences based on the data collected from the websites of sixty Chinese-medium national journals and sixty English-medium international journals. The findings point to a complex interplay between local and international traditions, norms, and politics of knowledge production. What these changes mean and how they may bear on author choice is discussed with implications for understanding the dynamic landscape of scholarly publishing in non-Anglophone systems of knowledge production.