This study aimed to examine the strategy use of Brazilian students learning Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) and the factors that might affect the variations in strategy use. The Strategy Inventory for Language Learning was employed as the research instrument, and altogether 120 students in a Confucius Institute in Brazil participated in the questionnaire survey. Statistical analyses of the data revealed that metacognitive and social strategies were the most frequently employed strategies by the participants. No significant differences were observed in the use of either overall or individual strategies by gender, age, or education level. Chinese proficiency level was found to impose main effects on the learners' overall strategy use as well as on the use of memory and cognitive strategies. This study has pedagogical implications for CFL teachers, as findings related to the learners' strategy use and the influencing factors can help CFL teachers tailor their instructions to the learner groups.

Despite the existing extensive research on stance markers such as hedges, boosters, and self-mention in academic writing, few studies, however, examined the co-occurrence of these stance markers to help authors project their identities in writing. In this study, we examine how self-mention with boosters and hedges are used by writers of different groups to manifest authorial presence and what functions they realize in research writing. Two self-compiled corpora were constructed to compare the discursive practice between Chinese PhD students and journal article writers from four disciplines in hard applied and hard pure science. In general, student writers use fewer self-mention with boosters but more self-mention with hedges than expert writers. An examination of the rhetorical functions of these devices shows that both expert and student writers employ most self-mention with boosters for presenting research findings, but students are more inclined to invest self-mention with boosters than expert writers when describing research procedures or elaborating arguments. Meanwhile, self-mention with hedges are mostly used for elaborating arguments, but compared with expert writers, students seem to overly obscure their presence in this function.