Routine press conferences nowadays have already become a very common and popular platform for government-media communication in China. This study examines journalists’ questions, which constitute an indispensable part in government-media communication, before and after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis at Chinese press conferences. The focus of the analysis is the variation of “adversarialness” contained in journalists’ questions before and after the outbreak of the pandemic crisis. The coding of this study considered the characteristics of Chinese data and was based on a modified version of Clayman and Heritage’s widely used coding systems (Clayman & Heritage, 2002; Clayman, Elliott, Heritage & McDonald, 2006) for measuring adversarial questioning in U.S. press conferences. The results show that, there are variations on several indicators of adversarialness and the intensity of the indicators turns out to be different before and after the outbreak of the pandemic. Journalists indeed transform the press conference into a formidable instrument of political accountability under such special context.

Using a content analysis, the study aims to examine cross-cultural adaptation that is demonstrated in people’s online communication. Specifically, it compares and contrasts two Chinese online media, namely Mitbbs and Wenxuecity, both targeting overseas Chinese. The degree of cultural adaptation is revealed in the percentages of U.S. related topics or themes found among the posts in the “living abroad” columns of the two target media as well as the exact levels of intercultural sensitivity that Bennett theorized in his Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS). Intercultural sensitivity on the site of Wenxuecity has a greater ripple effect than Mitbbs. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Vita Sackville-West devoted herself to approaching perfection in the Other way of both gender and solitude. In regard to gender, she practiced dominating masculinity in her homosexual and heterosexual affairs and managed to equilibrate what she was in lack of as a female. In regard to solitude, she succeeded in counterbalancing what she had not achieved in real life by realizing her dominating dreams with wild imaginative sex-swapping in her novels and being remote as much as possible from the modern society in her poems and gardening. The root of Vita’s Other way of life might be discovered in three dimensions. Biologically, she did have more extrovert physical male features than ordinary women; psychoanalytically, she had the “active imagination” or “creative apperception” as the “capacity to be alone” motivated by the wills to pleasure, to power and to meaning; and metonymically, the context of her family, lovers and necessary triggers contributing to her views of life and relevant values established the indexical link between her choosing gender and solitude to approach perfection in the whole life.

This study is a contribution to a continued exploration of some of the factors responsible for second or foreign language learning. It is an examination of the true state of Japanese English learners’ Willingness to Communicate (WTC) in classrooms and attempts to investigate effective approaches to enhance learners’ WTC. The study hypothesizes that WTC within classrooms is influenced by whether students are extroverted or introverted and examines the correlation between learners’ WTC and extroversion-introversion theory. In addition, previous studies have suggested that affective factors, such as international posture and confidence are mostly responsible for WTC in second language learning, and these factors are also examined.
Epistemologically, I employed a quantitative research methodology with two groups of university students in Japan: the freshmen and the fourth grade (seniors) students with the aid of questionnaires. The data suggests that students’ WTC is not influenced by whether students are extroverts or introverts. It strongly indicates a correlation between WTC and students’ other personality traits. Moreover, I discovered that the degree by which WTC is influenced by these other personality traits depends on the contexts of learning in the EFL classrooms. The data also confirms the veracity of international posture and confidence.
Therefore, the study suggests that the most effective approaches to enhance students’ WTC are to provide a variety of stimulating learning experiences for the students; to reduce students’ anxiety; to boost their confidence through positive feedback that places less emphasis on students’ errors and to conduct classes through an invigorating eclectic mixture of methods and approaches that include task-based learning activities in small groups.

This paper aims to discuss the re-emerged culture shock and psychological adjustment of Chinese students during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. The investigation shows that Chinese overseas students, who had acculturated to the American culture, have just experienced a more severe cultural shock than ever before. Reasons for this are various, in which the hatred and anti-Chinese sentiment and the misleading information contribute a lot. What is encouraging is that some students’ culture shock has been alleviated slightly with the coming end of the pandemic. This study attempts to offer a perspective to critically reflect on the changes of the students’ cultural adaptation resulting from the pandemic, as well as to reflect on how we can rethink, and accordingly, take measures to restore these students’ confidence and help them have better contact with people from other cultures in this fast-changing complex world.