Although some critics consider it time-consuming and demanding, proponents of the monolingual approach for field research (i.e., learning to speak a target field language as part of the research process) argue that it can provide a unique insight into its structures. However, this claim remains largely unsubstantiated in the available literature…

We make sense of experiences of our own and others through different forms of stories -- movies, TV dramas, documentaries, books, songs, as well as stories that are told and re-told within our families and cultures. Our experiences are fragmented and happen in different places over the course of our lives. By putting stories together in a plot, we…

This article deals with the challenges of data collection from a Conversation Analysis (CA) perspective to researching synchronous, audio-visual eTandems. Conversation analysis is a research tradition that developed out of ethnomethodology and is concerned with the question of how social interaction in naturally occurring situations is organized.…

Higher education monitoring evaluation is a process that uses modern information technology to continually collect and deeply analyze relevant data, visually present the state of higher education, and provide an objective basis for value judgments and scientific decision making by diverse bodies Higher education monitoring evaluation is…

In the past few decades, especially since the 2008-09 economic downturn, the faculty of American colleges and universities has undergone a far-reaching transformation. Multiple factors, mainly extraneous to the campus itself, are reshaping higher education, and as a result a reprioritizing of the internal allocation of resources is occurring. The…

A recent article in this journal discusses ways to manage uncertainty when the research field abruptly and significantly changes on researchers working inside their own society (Kacen & Chaitin, 2006). Our essay extends this discussion by asking: How do researchers manage ambiguous, conflictual, and rapidly changing events when they engage in…

Since the mid 1990s of last Century, university rankings have become very popular in China. Six institutions have published such rankings; some of them have also detailed their ranking methodologies. This paper features a general introduction to university ranking in China, and to the methodologies of each ranking discussed. The paper also…

This article reports the challenges faced by Chinese higher education as it expands in scale. The scale of China's higher education has seen unprecedented expansion in recent years. This article explores the new opportunities and challenges that such expansion brings to China's higher education. The author states that, aside from the many…

Focuses on the implementation and development of a pioneering action research project in a Sino-British English program. The article describes the project's goal to introduce the notion of action research into China, to encourage reflective teaching and classroom research among trainee teachers, and to bridge the theories studied with classroom…

Student behavior analysis is an active research topic in distance education in recent years. In this article, we propose a new method called Boosting to investigate students' behaviors. The Boosting Algorithm can be treated as a data mining method, trying to infer from a large amount of training data the essential factors and their relations that…