Despite extensive discussion on critical thinking (CT) by Chinese students, there are still debates over the question of why Chinese higher education students, when studying abroad, lack (or rather do not demonstrate) CT skills. The main objective of this paper is to explore how far it can be established from the published research literature whether the key factor affecting Chinese university students' CT with respect to academic study in English is cultural background or previous training. The conclusion is that culture cannot be the sole explanation for Chinese students' CT performance at universities abroad. The evidence strongly suggests that, while CT elements can indeed be found in ancient Chinese culture, many other factors, especially students' previous learning experiences, are of more immediate relevance and likely to affect performance. As a result, a holistic approach is suggested. The review also suggests that there is at times a lack of clear definitions and/or explanations of the scope of the key concept - culture - in the current literature.
[Copyright of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2010.546400]

The development of adequate collocational knowledge is important for foreign language learners; nonetheless, learners often have difficulties in producing proper collocations in the target language. Among the various ways of learning collocations, the DDL (data-driven learning) approach encourages independent learning of collocations and allows learners to directly use corpora and tools to search for proper collocations. Concordancers have been one of the key tools in the DDL approach. However, based on the findings of empirical studies, many existing web concordancers have not been very helpful in retrieving collocations. To help EFL students and teachers quickly locate proper collocates, this article introduces a web-based collocation retrieval tool, WebCollocate, which is based on a large part of speech-tagged Gutenberg corpus. To determine if the new tool can facilitate the searching of collocations, this tool and the Hong Kong Polytechnic web concordancer were used by two groups of college EFL students to find proper collocates in a translation task. The results showed that the students who used the WebCollocate tool found more proper English collocates. In addition, a group of 35 pre-service English teachers were also invited to evaluate the effectiveness of this collocation tool. These EFL teachers indicated that they could easily find proper English collocates with the help of WebCollocate. However, they also suggested that the search options and the presentation of search outcomes of this tool can be further improved. It seems that a more dedicated collocation retrieval tool can facilitate collocation teaching and learning, but the functions of this tool can be further enhanced. The findings of this study can be useful for language teachers, researchers, and developers of corpus-based tools.
[Copyright of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2010.526945]

This article explores language ideologies and language uses in a multilingual university in Hong Kong by exploring the voices and experiences of both mainland Chinese and Hong Kong students. Drawing on the notions of language ideologies, separate multilingualism, and translanguaging, the research illustrates how students' linguistic ideologies are shaped by multilingual encounters in the educational setting and index broader institutional and ideological frameworks and examines the identity positions they construct and present and the social spaces they jointly establish. It also demonstrates that the multilingual university context provides students a site to establish a translanguaging space with hybrid language use in which linguistic resources are employed to perform a range of subject positions and to play a number of roles.
[Copyright of International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2013.766148]