Richard (Jianxin) Liu

Charles Sturt University · School of Education

The Covid-19 pandemic has directly impacted the way teachers and learners worldwide teach and learn languages, forcing numerous educational activities in technologically-deprived contexts to stop altogether and those in technologically-rich environments to go online on an emergency basis. This volume provides a collection of theoretical and practic...

This article reports on an analysis of author guidelines to examine the influence of academic publishers and journals over the video abstract as an emerging genre. The data consist of author guidelines from a Spanish journal index and were analyzed based on a two-layered multimodal analysis adapted from the Genre and Multimodality model. The layout...

This article reports on a revised move analysis of a video abstract (VA) repository curated by Cell Press. The analysis reveals that the VA displays several distinct core moves, optional moves, and move units. The analysis suggests that albeit evidence being inconclusive due to the sample size, the VA is in effect an emerging genre whose implicatio...

The past decade has seen growing influence of multimodality over writing for academic journals, as well as an overall lack of research attention. In our analysis reported in this paper, we position academic journals as a text space where genres such as research articles are accommodated. We focus our analysis on examining communicative purposes of...

Interactivity is an important indicator of an educational app's reception. Since most educational apps are multimodal, it justifies a methodological initiative to understand meaningful involvement of multimodality in enacting and even amplifying interactivity in an educational app. Yet research so far has largely concentrated on algorithm construct...

Urban public playgrounds are key community hubs that support lifelong learning, healthy living, social integration, and civic engagement but many of them are unable to sustain their promises while challenged by the emerging digital spaces such as online gaming and virtual reality. This article takes a different stance to envisage digital spaces as...

This article employs schematic framing as an analytic tool to examine the popular culture figure of Lady Gaga as a genre. It is known that genre analysis is a powerful tool for popular cultural studies. However, the typical genre approach which relies on identification of the stable linguistic (and semiotic) features a genre entails in respect of f...

In the past three or so decades, large-scale domestic migration has had an enormous impact on the lives of women in Mainland China’s countryside (Chan and Zhang 1999; Chen 1995; Perry and Selden 2003). A great number of these women, known in the media as working sisters or dagong mei, work at low-paid domestic and manufacturing jobs while living in...

Multimodality is an emergent aspect of educational assessment that has received increasing attention from educators and educational researchers. Unfortunately, this new assessment practice has been entrenched in the hegemonic gaze of teaching- and learning-centric pedagogical paradigm from the outset. To reconstruct multimodal educational assessmen...

The genre-based approach to second language education has been influential over the past three decades. Although debates about whether genre should be overtly instructed as procedures, implicitly introduced through processes, or tacitly exposed for raising awareness are yet to settle, researchers are unanimous in the view that commanding a repertoi...

Voice reveals stance, position and other evaluative aspects of texts. In spite of its major role in establishing blogs' recognition and participation in the social networking space, voice has not received adequate attention in online communication research. This paper attempts to explore the voice of blogs through examining personal blogs. Data wer...

This article presents a textual analysis of Chinese personal blogs to understand how social interactions and performances are enacted in this evolving genre. On account of the complexity of genre composition, the present analysis focuses on examining the organizational aspect of personal blogs. Data were collected from three Chinese A-list personal...

Desires are emitted from and realized by textual resources or performances. Personal blogs, as a sub-genre of the blog and a personal media create an intimate textual space for performing desires. The analysis reported in this article takes one of the earliest Chinese personal blogs, Muzi Mei’s blog, which was infamously tooted as the Mother of Chi...

The Chinese blogosphere is not identical to its English forerunners since its inception in 1999. From social constructivist (Doolittle and Hicks 2003) and connectivist (Downes 2007; Siemens 2005) perspectives, socio-cultural and political conditions, beliefs, and values as well as various practices of bloggers could have contributed to such dissimi...

This paper focuses on a study of identity-related performance in personal blogs. The study is based on an analysis of three A-list Chinese personal blogs (Muzi Mei’s blog, Liumang Yan’s blog, and Acosta’s blog) selected from the top blog service providers in China between 2003 and 2006. A lifestyle mapping model composed of layers of social demogra...

This contrastive study is concerned with relations between rhetoric and ethnicity in second language (L2) writing. It investigates the influence of Chinese rhetoric on expository writing in English by three groups: the majority Chinese Han group, and two ethnic minorities, Tibetan and Mongolian. Relying on a contrastive text analysis of 30 hortator...