Making Full Use of Graded Readers to Facilitate EFL Creative Writing Teaching and Learning

Creative writing in EFL classrooms is teachable. Graded readers as ‘pedagogic’ and ‘adapted’ reading materials show much noticeable potential value in creative writing teaching and learning. With controlled language, graded readers match the different levels of language competency of learners. Making full use of graded readers as extensive reading and intensive reading materials is essential to help EFL students enjoy reading, acquire English, and creative writing skills. With carefully designed activities, graded readers can function as a resource for language input and expose learners to comprehensible vocabulary and grammar use. They can also serve as a model for EFL creative writing, arouse learners’ creative language use and genre awareness, and act as a tool to elicit creativity and imagination

Communication Strategy Training: A Step to Strategic Competence in L2 Interaction

Communicative language teaching should not just aim to teach learners the language they need in communication, but also the communication strategies to manage interaction in English. Explicit strategy instruction is acknowledged to be effective in raising learners’ awareness and equipping them with the strategic competence to solve interaction difficulties and improve their performance. This paper first presents the definition of communicationstrategies (CSs), followed by the description of CSs achievement strategiesand time gaining strategies. To help teachers train their learners how to use CSs, the paper points out the necessity of arousing learners’ awareness of using CSs, and the crucial role of teachers as good examples of using CSs. Meanwhile, the researcher also elaborates that learners’ need linguistic devices to pave the way for using CSs and the opportunities to practice

Reappear sea in the land-reforming the waterfront living spaces

Since Barcelona implemented the Plan Cerdà at 1859, the city has started the process of building a modern city. A series of urban planning projects and transformations gradually formed nowadays metropolitan city. Especially after holding 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games, Barcelona has gained recognition as 'Barcelona Model' in its urban-planning efforts for the past 40 years. However, it’s certain that the processes of metropolitan decentralization experienced a spectacular acceleration precisely in the post-Olympic period where the municipal local authority of Barcelona lost number of inhabitants, jobs and economic activities coinciding with the decentralization. This paper concentrates on analysing the waterfront living spaces. There are four main situations of encounter between the city and water: along the river, around the lake, embeded in the water network and open to the sea. By studying and concluding characteristics of each corresponding case, Copenhagen, Denmark; Suzhou, China; Hamburg, Germany and Barcelona, Spain, thus summarizing a feasible waterfront living space method for the site selected of Barcelona to achieve a brand development. The paper concludes the future projects of Barcelona in the 21st century. On the threshold of a new urban planning model (Barcelona 5.0), it’s a possible approach that re-naturalization of the city and re-connection of the waterfront and the city. On the basis of researches, the paper seeks to summarize several design strategies used in waterfront living space, thus making a practice in the final design to promote 'reappear sea on the land', a new waterfront living space for Barcelona

Interpreting Attitude Resources in China Daily Editorials

Editorials play a significant role in conveying newspaper’s opinions and influencing the viewpoints or ideology of their readers with careful selections and configurations of certain resources of Appraisal. This study is concerned with the social function of Attitude resources by which editorial writers express their attitudes. It examines and elaborates the patterns and preferences of Attitude resources in 35 editorials from China Daily in terms of the three subcategories: Affect, Judgment and Appreciation. The findings indicate that values of Propriety and Capability and Valuation occur much more frequently in the data than the others values. However, Affect states are rare. Explicit attitudes outweigh implicit ones to make reading easy and therefore align readers. The writers also prefer rank attitudes highly to win over putative readers. The functionalities of the deployment of the resources are interpreted in terms of conveying ideology in the editorials and manipulating readers with power in the concluding remarks