A teacher’s assessment literacy refers to her or his demonstrated understanding of the principles behind selecting and designing tasks, judging student work, and interpreting and using assessment data to support student learning. This study examines the development of the task design aspect of assessment literacy in 12 Chinese language teachers as they participated in a two-year authentic assessment professional development program. By analysing the quality of assessment tasks designed by the teachers over time, we found that, although teachers quickly grasped many aspects of task design, they found it difficult to incorporate certain knowledge manipulation criteria into their assessments. The study provides insights into the contextual and discipline-embedded challenges that face language teachers with regard to assessment.

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This chapter examines the defining linguistic innovations and social motivations for one of the most popular modes of computer mediated communication: the online chat. Due to its nature of being largely synchronous, anonymous, and mainly text-based, online chat offers a social interactional environment where people can experience the feeling of making new friends or acquaintances, psychologically experiment with different identities, and explore new relationships without the shyness that face-to-face interaction can bring. The largely informal and recreational nature of online chat, together with the time constraints that force communicators to come up with interesting ways to sustain efficient communication, turns online chat into a frontier of linguistic innovation. In turn, this leads to a deeper understanding of the nature of online communities.

In the last 15 years, China has witnessed the world’s fastest growth in terms of Internet infrastructure construction and number of Internet users. In order to realize its ambition in maximizing the economic value of the Internet while minimizing its destabilizing and disruptive potential, the Chinese government has adopted a policy that encourages the technological development of the Chinese Internet. The government, however, also maintains a very tight control over the Chinese people’s online activities. In order to avoid or break through the government’s regulatory effort, netizens in China have worked out many interesting ways of expressing ideas online. Among the various linguistic strategies adopted by Chinese netizens, five are particularly prominent and arguably more effective. They are using homophony, dismantling Chinese characters, using sarcasm, extending the semantic sense of words, and using English or Pinyin initials. This chapter examines how government monitoring of online media in China is employed to restrict people’s freedom of expression and how Chinese netizens are using certain features inherent in their language and culture to exercise their right of free expression in such a context.

This chapter describes how American bloggers and Chinese bloggers from similar age and gender groups represent themselves and their identities linguistically in their blogs and explores whether and to what extent the differences in terms of the blogging language and culture affect these representations. The author adopts a corpus-based approach and focuses on the description and the comparison of the orthographic features and semantic domain preference as revealed in the blog entries. By conducting a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparison between American bloggers and Chinese bloggers, the author finds that bloggers’ linguistic practice is closely related to their developmental stage of life, their gender, and the cultural environment they are immersed in. Meanwhile, bloggers’ linguistic practice is also constrained by the internal system of the language they use for blogging.