Over the last decade, many educators have been investigating the pedagogical effectiveness of blended learning and flipped classroom models. In the conventional teaching process, instructors have been playing an essential role in the lecturing process. Conversely, students lead the learning process in the flipped classroom because they must complete tasks with extracurricular materials and classroom collaboration. Likewise, blended learning also asks students to dominate classroom learning procedures, but its communication medium is a mixture of face-to-face and online interaction. This essay evaluates blended learning and the flipped classroom model by evidence of both pros and cons. Lastly, the article concluded that the two new models provide significant reference cases in exploring better practice modes to increase the quality of second language teaching.

As a window city for China to face internationalization, Zhuhai is quite suitable for linguists to look into Expanding Circle Countries’ English settings. Bilingual landmarks indicate the use of English in the local public sphere and the degree of the popularity of English. This study investigated the current situation of English in Zhuhai from two academic fields: linguistics landscape and language policy. The two types of language policy: the top-down model and the bottom-up mode, are used in the analysis of Zhuhai sociolinguistic phenomenon. An analysis from the language policy perspective reveals how the linguistic landscape has been interpreted from diversified dimensions as both a concept and a practice. The study evinces that the different target tourists and the various functions of facilities are two influential factors in the advancement of Zhuhai’s English signage.

Currently, a growing number of educators are aware of the need to look for new approaches to replace the “spoon-feeding” method. Therefore, the context-based strategy began to emerge. This study aims to investigate how students derive information through contextual clues by examining the progress of Chinese middle school EFL students in terms of word recognition. The participants of this study included 20 eighth grade students from the same middle school. The participants sat for two different quizzes: a contextual vocabulary quiz (quiz A) and a direct instruction quiz (quiz B). In quiz A, the participants inferred the meaning of the target words from the example sentences, whereas in quiz B, the students utilized the accompanying English explanation to guess other new words. These students were in the experimental and control conditions, respectively. The two quizzes comprised of 15 multiple choice questions (MCQ) which differentiated the participants’ word recognition response to two different learning methods. There were two significant findings from this study. First, the results showed that the context-based strategy leads to a better vocabulary learning performance compared to the direct instruction strategy. Second, although it is not as effective as the context-based strategy, the direct instruction strategy may assist EFL learners in remembering words in short term.

The last few decades have witnessed the invaluable impact of economic globalization on facilitating exchanges in transnational culture, whereas international tourism is an inevitable product of transcultural communication worldwide. While professional interpreters and tourist guides may alleviate the language barrier issue, the ever-growing demands for multilingual communication have become an essential factor needed to consider across transcultural settings, mainly tourists. The article investigates the implications of multilingual communication for tourism development and the commodification of culture according to circumstances at variance.