Journal of Asian Pacific Communication - Volume 29, Issue 2, 2019

This study builds upon a nascent body of scholarship that examines the transnational movement of White Westerners. The purpose is to complicate the literature on multiculturalism and globalization by examining the “reverse” migration from, rather than to, the West. Specifically, it examines White migrants’ mobilization of online social protest through a Facebook group that came together in response to a report broadcast on South Korea’s Munhwa Broadcasting Company (MBC) that was interpreted as racist and xenophobic. In response, White residents in Korea organized dissent and engaged in symbolic protest that served a collective ego function, creating community around a perceived sense of shared oppression as racialized minorities. To do so, they drew on global hierarchies, White supremacy, and heteronormativity to challenge their lack of control over their own representations in the local culture.

Many studies concerning culture and rhetoric have been restricted to the binary distinction of cultures or to etic perspectives by using western theories as framework to point out the weakness of Chinese rhetoric. Taking comparative rhetoric and emic approaches, this paper focuses on logical appeal and ethical appeal to discuss the cultural values reflected in the hotel discourses. In this study content analysis was used to encode the English and Chinese hotel introductions; quantitative method was used for data comparison and an interview for investigating the persuasiveness of the Chinese rhetorical strategies. The relation between cultural values and persuasive strategies was explored. It is concluded that cultural specificity at deep level is still an indispensable factor determining rhetorical strategies despite the globalization.

Media credibility, as a construct that has been mainly developed in the western context, hasn’t been examined thoroughly and tested in Asia cultural and social context. This research discusses and verifies media credibility as a multi-dimensional construct, with the support of empirical data. It discusses the impact of privately-owned news websites, e.g. Sina, on state-owned television stations, e.g. CCTV, with a focus on media credibility in the context of China. The data supports that media credibility includes both professional and political dimensions. The dimension of political orientation is a unique one developed directly in the context of China with empirical data support. This paper also explores contributing factors that impact media credibility in the Chinese context, and finds positive impact of privately-owned website use on media credibility of state-owned television.

The present study examined English textbooks used in Japanese middle and high schools, and analyzed to what extent the English words that are included in those textbooks are already integrated into the vocabulary pool of Japanese as loanwords. The findings of the present study showed that approximately 80% of the English words introduced in the first four years of English education in schools in Japan are already integrated into Japanese as loanwords. Based on this high percentage of English words with loanword counterparts in Japanese, the present study has argued that English loanwords in Japanese can be used as a resource for learning new vocabulary in the field of EFL education for L1 speakers of Japanese.

The present study aims (1) to study stereotype contents of a target population, and (2) to test the predictive power of three contesting theoretical models in the communication framework of who→says what→in which channel→to whom→with what effect (Lasswell, 1948). A purposive sample of (N = 291) Vietnamese high school and college students found that they have positive stereotypes about Americans in general and a mix of positive and negative stereotypes about Black/African-Americans. Of the three theoretical models, the communication model had collectively the strongest predictors, followed by the psychological model, and then the contact model. Theoretical as well as practical implications of the study is discussed.

Social media as a new tool for political communication influences current developments in political campaigning. In combination with mainstream media, social media is increasingly used for purposes such as political marketing, mobilisation of voters, and public debate. This paper discusses how social media helped the Malaysian main opposition coalition, Alliance of Hope (PH), to topple the ruling party, National Front (BN), which had ruled Malaysia for the last 61 years. Literature on new media rarely shows positive relationships between new media usage and voting decisions. At most, social media plays a crucial role in extending the dissemination of information to voters. However, PH had to rely solely on social media for their political marketing in reaching out to both urban and rural constituencies, as the coalition was denied access to the government-controlled mainstream media. With data-based information, PH was able to segment voters and focus on marginalised constituencies, young voters, middle-class urban voters, and rural constituencies, which were the ruling party’s main fortress, contributing to 57% of the vote. One of the misconceptions many politicians and political parties have is that merely using social media will win them the election. Ultimately, what mattered more in this case was whether political parties could register the currents of change percolating within an evolving Malaysian society and address voter grievances accordingly, something that BN, even with control over mainstream media and superior usage of social media, did not do.

Despite the stated importance of fieldwork within the discipline of Linguistics, and the existence of several texts about fieldwork (Thieberger, 2012; Bowren, 2008; Newman & Ratliff, 2001), there is very little literature concerning the experience of fieldwork from tertiary students’ perspectives (see Macaulay, 2012). In this article, the work of four New Zealand postgraduate linguistics students working with fourteen Vanuatu teachers to translate reading materials written in Bislama into seven vernacular languages is documented. Findings indicate that students were motivated to be involved in the fieldwork by a range of factors including travel, altruism, and commitment to the communities and their languages; they drew on and, in some cases, clarified many concepts from their undergraduate studies; and that the fieldwork experiences both allowed them to gain confidence in their linguistic skills and influenced their future studies in linguistics.

Nowadays, international communication using English as the medium is a common occurrence. To communicate effectively, English as a second language (ESL) speakers need to possess relevant communicative skills including understanding and being familiar with inner circle accents. This paper seeks to find out ESL learners’ evaluative reactions to four inner circle accents, representing British, American, Australian and New Zealand English varieties, through an accent perception and a survey task conducted on Malaysian undergraduates at a public university in Malaysia. The participants responded to descriptors on speaker attributes categorized into three dimensions: competence, social appeal and accent preference while or after listening to a recorded passage read in one of the four accents by male and female speakers. The learners showed a tendency to prefer certain accents more than others. In general, the best rated accent was the British accent for the male speakers and the American accent for the female speakers. The New Zealand accent was rated the lowest among the male speakers and one of the lowest among the female speakers. The study also found that speaker’s competence, speaker’s social appeal and accent preference were positively correlated. These findings highlight the importance of listening practices and exposure to various English accents in ESL classrooms to prepare students for international and intercultural communication.