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This study explored stereotypes about China held by young Malaysians. It focused on the learners ofthe Mandarin language in a big public university. The study not only examined the content but also assessed the favourability and salience ofthe language learners' stereotypes, which had not been done in the previous studies. The stereotypes about China provided by the participants were diverse; they referred to culture, politics, language, history, climate, landscape, economics, religion and the Chinese people. Overall, the stereotypes were favourable. Especially the stereotypes referring to Chinese traditional and popular culture and cultural symbols were among the most frequent and most salient images of China. An interesting finding was that transnational popular culture played an important role in the formation of the stereotypical images about China. The study concludes by highlighting some pedagogical implications based on these fmdings.

Quantitative applied linguistics research often takes place in restricted settings of an intact language classroom, workplace, phonetics laboratory or longitudinal sample. In such settings the samples tend to be small, which raises several methodological problems. The main aim of the current paper is to give a detailed explanation of methodological and practical implications inherent in a robust statistical method called bootstrapped quantile regression (BQR) analysis. Importantly for applied linguistics research, the BQR method could help to deal with methodological difficulties inherent in small sample studies. The current study employed a moderately small sample (N = 27) of students learning the Japanese language in a Malaysian public university. It examined the relationships between the students’ language learning motivation (specifically, integrative orientation), the students’ images or stereotypes about Japan and their global attitudes toward the target language country and its people. The findings indicated that there was a statistically significant relationship between the students’ attitudes toward the target language country and their integrative orientation. In addition, these attitudes were found to be the most constant determinant of the integrative orientation. Besides the applied linguistics research, the BQR method can be used in a variety of the human sciences research where a sample size is small.