Celebrating Chinese New Year Worldwide

<正>During the Spring Festival in 2012, the Cultural Ministry of China, along with China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Education, State Administration of Radio, Film and TV and the State Council Office for Overseas Chinese Affairs     

The Changing Faces of Manx Witchcraft

ABSTRACT

The nature of witchcraft beliefs and trials in the early modern Isle of Man has recently been the subject of some excellent research. The history of attitudes to witchcraft on the island is, however, also susceptible to a different approach: that of examining the manner in which they have developed and adapted over the time since the opening of the modern period. This longer perspective reveals, as did the close study of the early modern material, that Man both exhibited a number of individualistic features and acted as a microcosm of more general alterations in belief. As those alterations have, as yet, failed to attract any sustained interest from historians, the perspective shed upon them by the Manx material is all the more important. Man's abundant early modern archives and rich modern literary culture together provide ample evidence for such a case study, while the latter presents wider implications for the treatment of the subject in a broader context.     

Negotiating Faces in Coping with Workplace Bullying: A Cross-Cultural Investigation

Workplace bullying is often a traumatic communication experience. Using face-negotiation theory, this study compared strategic coping behaviors of employees from individualistic and collectivistic cultures. Findings from surveys of U.S. Americans and Singaporeans (N = 648) revealed that face concerns predict use of coping strategies modestly. In both cultures, self-face positively relates to neglect and acquiescence, and other-face negatively associates with retribution. Further, culture does not moderate relationships between face concerns and enactment of strategic coping behaviors, suggesting that people in both cultures cope with bullying in a similar manner.     

Capital of Cultural Diversity Attracts Tourists Worldwide ——2006 Quanzhou Tourism Promotion Fair

2006 Quanzhou Tourism Promotion Fair, with the theme of ＂blue Quanzhou bay and fascinating Shaolin Gongfu of south China＂ took place from September 4 to 7 in Quanzhou, a historically and culturally famous city in the coastal province of Fujian. More than 1000 participants from Russia, Japan, South Korea, Germany, the Philippines and Singapore as well as representatives from Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and other provinces and cities of the country attended this promotional fair, which aimed to showcase the city＇s tourism resources.     

Spreading Chinese Culture Worldwide简

Aiming at commending overseas Chinese,foreign friends and public figures of China who have made huge contribution to the dissemination of Chinese culture, the award ceremony of “China Light： Persons of the Year 2013 in Disseminating Chinese Culture”, jointly hosted by the Ministry of Culture, the Information Office of the State Council, the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council, Chinese People＇s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries and others, was held in Beijing on December 20, 2013. Senior officials fTom these host departments attended the ceremony and presented the awards to ten individuals and one group.     

Racial Identity and Challenges of Educating White Youths for Cultural Diversity

Establishing trust and breaking down social and psychological barriers are essential in multicultural education courses. Contributing to the complexity of establishing trust and minimizing barriers is the varying applicability of these concepts across ethnic and nonethnic groups. Ten suggestions are provided to combat resistance and establishing trust in such classes. They include (a) Know yourself as a cultural, ethnic, and racial being; (b) Understand that culture is neither ethnicity nor race; (c) Don't treat the classroom as a therapy group; (d) To be equitable is to be responsible; (e) Everyone is at their own stage of awareness and ethnic development; (f) Understand dynamics of institutional and individual racism; (g) Everyone's voice is important; (h) Multiculturalism is contextual; and (i) Know your role as instructor.     

Effects of Japanese national identification on attitudes toward learning English and self-assessed English proficiency

This research examined effects of Japanese national identification and attitude toward the United States on attitude toward learning English and self-assessed English proficiency among a sample of Japanese university students (N = 377). We assessed various components of Japanese national identification drawn from previous work by Kosterman and Feshbach [Kosterman, R., & Feshbach, S. (1989). Towards a measure of patriotic and nationalistic attitudes. Political Psychology, 10, 257–274] and Karasawa [Karasawa, M. (2002). Patriotism, nationalism, and internationalism among Japanese citizens: An etic-emic approach. Political Psychology, 23(4), 645–666], specifically: patriotism (positive identification with and affective attachment to country), nationalism (perceptions of national superiority and support for national dominance), internationalism (support for international goodwill and cooperation), and commitment to national heritage (devotion to national symbols and cultural heritage). Patriotism predicted less positive attitudes toward learning English, whereas nationalism, internationalism, and pro-U.S. attitudes predicted more positive attitudes toward learning English. Nationalism also predicted higher self-assessed English proficiency. These relationships remained after controlling for the instrumental value of English and demographic factors in multiple regression equations. Our findings highlight the need for closer examination of specific aspects of Japanese national identification, and their relationships with Japanese attitudes toward the English language.     

Challenges of cultural industry knowledge exchange in live performance audience research

ABSTRACT

With live performance audience research frequently relying on cultural organisations to facilitate access to their audiences, this article addresses the issues involved in evidencing spectators’ responses via discursive methodologies. Recalling a series of empirical projects conducted over the past ten years with a range of theatre practitioners, it examines the conflicts involved in carrying out scholarly studies of audience reception against cultural organisations’ pressures to produce their own ongoing audience evaluations. Examining key concerns about audience research raised by creative practitioners in varying theatrical contexts, from site-specific to building-based work, it addresses the difficulties of understanding live performance reception and aesthetic experience via impact frameworks. It begins by situating these three operations in the context of Knowledge Exchange (KE) between academics within Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and those in the creative industry sector.     

从节日文化的变迁看中国传统文化在现代社会所面临的挑战

<正>随着经济的快速发展和综合国力的增强,中国的软实力迅速崛起,体现在节日文化上,就是中国传统节日逐渐走向国际化,除了传统汉文化圈的日本、朝鲜半岛以及华人聚居地东南亚等把春节定为全国法定假日外,美国的纽约州、马里兰州和纽约市、旧金山市,澳大利亚的悉尼市等地也先后把春节定为法定假日。     

English education in the Indian multi-lingual classroom

In Britain, film studies came on the agenda in the 1970s, when it served as a terrain for the formulation of a critical understanding of how cinema functioned within the broader context of industrial capitalism and the nexus between that and the reshaping of people's habits and lives. However, during that decade, a different agenda was also at work, which, from the early 1980s, began to receive support from neo‐liberal ‘free‐market’ ideologues. Over a period of 30 years, the overall direction of the inquiry into cinema, now firmly sealed into institutional networks, has become such that the critical language of ‘film theory’ has been hollowed out and the industrial agenda of British national television and cinema wrapped around it. Today, with the opening of film studies departments across Asia, the question is not whether outside Britain the language of film studies will became available for instrumentalization by the forces of an expanding Euro‐American capital, but how it will do so. This paper argues that the recovery of film from the bureaucratization of its study and its rediscovery as one of the modalities of modernization require both a framework of analysis that is fully conscious of its own historicity and critical role, and a new topography of cinema.     

"英文起源于蚕"--另一种意义上的"东方主义"

2002年3月15日,中国的媒体照例为保护消费者权益而全线鼓噪,一片打假之声不绝于耳。一个巧合性的例外亮点是,中央电视台新闻节目播出英国皇家地理学会重要学术报告:凯文·孟席斯宣布他多年的研究成果—中国的航海家郑和才是世界历史上最先发现美洲的人。孟席斯的学术发现由于媒体的介入而迅速传播到世界各地,相信我国媒体对此的兴趣会比英美各国更加高涨。这使我想起几个月前在伦敦目睹的另一个惊人的学术观点:英文起源于中文。那是2001年10月27日,伦敦难得的大晴天。一场秋雨洗刷过的城市显得格外清爽。毗邻大英博物馆的伦敦大学亚非学院(…     

Religion and Politics in English Monastic Towns

ABSTRACT

This article tackles religion and politics as different aspects of a variety of social practices within a common culture. It examines thie political and religious climate of English provincial towns with a monastic presence in the period before before 1540. It demonstrates the extent to which monastic interests were fused with those of local elites, and argues those elites sought to undercut the process of dissolution and to preserve something of the monastic framework through the unfolding crisis. It challenges the notion of a natural dialect between traditional religion and provincial politics and uncovers a dynamic of negotiation productive for both constituencies before and after the Dissolution.     

The English Only Movement: Revisiting Cultural Hegemony

Between national and state budget cuts in education and an ever increasing push toward the English Only movement, a rise in dropout rates for Hispanic students is imminent. National data show the percentage of Hispanic students who drop out of high school to be nearly 60% in some states including Michigan, South Dakota, West Virginia, Alabama, Connecticut, South Carolina, Nevada, and Ohio. While numerous studies have been conducted to find out why this is happening, the research findings indicate a complexity of issues surrounding Hispanic student achievement, ranging from a lack of linguistic ability in English to issues of self-esteem. While nearly 4.7 million students are being served in programs of language assistance, this article focuses on Hispanic students as an illustrative example of a larger phenomenon: Reproductive acculturation disguised as benevolence, carried out by linguistic hegemony.     

Japanese national identification and English language learning processes

Building upon the seminal work of Kosterman and Feshbach (1989), the previous context specific work of Karasawa (2002), and the recent work of Sullivan and Schatz (2009), this paper examines four psychosocial facets of Japanese national identification in relation to a selection of English language learning processes among 401 Japanese university students majoring in English and International Communication. Based upon the literature discussed, a theoretical model of causality was created by the author and tested via the application of a structural equation modeling analysis. The outcome of this process suggests that within the social context of Japan, ‘commitment to national heritage’ is a significant mediator of both ‘nationalistic’ and ‘patriotic’ attitudes. It was also found that ‘nationalism’ was a significant positive predictor of ‘internationalism’ and of a positive ‘orientation toward English speaking culture and community’, whereas ‘patriotism’ was found to be a negative predictor of ‘internationalism’ and of a positive ‘orientation toward English speaking culture and community’. These findings, in addition to other more pedagogically focused outcomes are discussed in relation to the function and promotion of aspects of Japanese national identification, and the possible impact which the various facets, particularly patriotism, may have upon the development of positive intercultural relations and learning English as a foreign language.     

The Global and the Multicultural: Opportunities,Challenges, and Suggestions for Teacher Education

Most teacher education programs today include at least a minimal component of multicultural education. Higher educational institutions are also engaging more broadly in global education in a variety of forms. Though there is significant overlap in the aims of these two fields, they are often not used in complementary ways, or may even be seen as competing fields of study. This article outlines ways in which global perspectives can inform several multicultural concepts used in teacher education. It then explicates the challenges and limitations to this approach, which are not trivial. Finally, it suggests a number of ways in which teacher education programs and institutions can minimize the challenges of a global approach to multicultural education, while simultaneously moving toward institutionally transformative goals of multicultural education.     

《英文举隅》与《英文话规》——同文馆毕业生编译的早期英语文法书

黄兴涛先生曾以“晚清英文语法概念和知识的最早传播”为题,对英语在华传播史上最早出现的几本鲜为人知但却极具重要意义的英语文法书进行了系统考订（详见《文史知识》2006年第3、第4、第5期）,指出《英国文语凡例传》是我国“第一部中英文对照的英语文法书”,《文学书官话》是“以中文‘讲明’英语文法学的最早著作”,而《文法初阶》则是“中国人独立汉译的首部完整的英语文法书”,