Nurturing critical thinking (CT) has been acknowledged as a core objective of tertiary education, and drawn attention from academia of teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in China. The thrust of the present study was to determine the association between CT and EFL argumentative writing among Chinese undergraduates. To this end, 110 English majors across three grades at two universities were conveniently selected and given the critical thinking skills (CTS) test and EFL argumentative writing test. The results of this study indicated that undergraduate English majors in China did not possess strong CTS. Though their CTS was not found to be significantly correlated with EFL argumentative writing performance, textual analysis of typical essays showed that strong-CTS learners outperformed weak-CTS ones in relevance, clarity, logicality, profundity and flexibility of argumentative writing. The obtained results suggest a need to integrate CT into EFL writing instruction.

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The study reported in this article aims to capture the possible changes to the discursive mode of College English (CE) teaching in China by comparing teachers' questions, feedback, and teaching exchanges across two levels of quality courses constructed at different years. Based on transcribed data of 20 videos, it reveals that the general discursive mode of CE teaching was pedagogic; constraints such as sociocultural backgrounds, CE testing system, and factors related to teacher, student, and classroom may account for this mode. Meanwhile, significant differences were found regarding teachers' questioning behaviour and feedback as years elapsed and the course level rose, which may be caused by underlying teachers' beliefs. Implications for Chinese CE teachers and tertiary-level teachers in other Asian English-as-a-foreign-language classrooms are discussed, including the urgency for teachers in teacher-fronted classes to shift their discursive mode from pedagogic to natural to foster students' communicative competence, and suggestions for how to effectuate this shift provided.

This study investigates 128 Chinese college students to examine the effects of their musical aptitude and musical training on phonological production in four foreign languages. Results show that musically-trained students remarkably possessed stronger musical aptitude than those without musical training and performed better than their counterpart in foreign language suprasegmental production. Students of high musical aptitude performed significantly better in suprasegmental production and Russian production as compared with those of low musical aptitude. Musical aptitude could exert some effects on foreign language phonological production. With the music-phonology link confirmed in this study, pedagogical implications for teaching and learning of foreign language phonology are discussed.

Although pronunciation is a salient component of effective oral communication, English phonetics instruction has long been marginalized in China and relevant research is also scarce. To bridge this gap, we did a survey of 64 English majors from a Chinese university and 13 English Phonetics quality courses on national, provincial and collegiate levels constructed from 2004 to 2014 by Chinese universities. Our survey study disclosed tertiary-level students' perceptions of English phonetics instruction and the state quo of English phonetics instruction in China. Based on the results of our study, implications for how to advance English phonetics instruction of China in the future were discussed.