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There have been widespread concerns over the decline of modern languages and waning interest in learning languages other than English (LOTEs) around the world, thought to be partly due to recent political events including Brexit and Trump's aggressive isolationism in the United States. By contrast, governments in Greater China have energetically renewed their investment in promoting LOTE education, driven by globalisation initiatives such as Mainland China's 'Belt and Road' initiative and Taiwan's 'New Southbound Policy'. Thus, it remains pertinent to explore the policies and practices of multilingual education expansion in this region, as the success or failure of the globalisation initiatives may have profound consequences for the prospects of multilingual and multicultural development at universities in the Greater China region and perhaps around the world. This special issue presents empirical studies in which the authors, as insiders engaged in the new wave of language policy shifts, offer diverse perspectives on issues including foreign language curricula, learners' motivational identities and teachers' professional development. We contend that to sustain the increase in multilingual education, the tensions between global English and LOTEs, between individual identity and contextual variation, and between instrumental orientation and translanguaging/transcultural values of language learning need to be addressed.

Abstract-BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) as a de-facto standard for web service orchestration has drawn particularly attention from researchers and industries. BPEL is a semi-formal flow language with complex features such as concurrency and hierarchy. To test a model thoroughly, we need to cover different execution scenarios. As is well known, it is tedious, time-consuming, and error prone to design test cases manually, especially for complex modelling languages. Hence, it is desirable to apply existing model-based-testing techniques in the domain of web services. We proposed WSA (Web Service Automata) to be the operational semantics for BPEL. Based on WSA, we propose a model checking based test case generation framework for BPEL. The SPIN and NuSMV model checkers are used as the test generation engine, and the conventional structural test coverage criteria are encoded into LTL and CTL temporal logic. State coverage and transition coverage are used for BPEL control flow testing, and all-du-path coverage is used for BPEL data flow testing. Two levels of test cases can be generated to test whether the implementation of web services conforms to the BPEL behaviour and WSDL interface models. The generated test cases are executed on the JUnit test execution engine.

The antitumor activity of Lycium barbarum polysaccharide (LBP) has been reported, but the structure-bioactivity relationship has still not been fully elucidated. In this study, four watersoluble LBP fractions with serial different molecular weights (MWs) were separated from LBP, designated LBP-2, LBP-3, LBP-4, and LBP-5. After a characteristic analysis, the relationship between MW and antitumor activity of LBP was investigated both in vitro using murine hepatoma H22 cells and in vivo using H22 tumor-bearing mice. In vitro, the results showed that all the LBP fractions had significant inhibition on H22 cells, in which LBP-3 had the best activity. LBP-3 could induce apoptosis, mitochondrial membrane potential destruction, and S phase arrest in H22 cells. In vivo, the results showed that LBP-2, LBP-3, LBP-4, and LBP-5 could inhibit the tumor growth in H22 tumor-bearing mice by 18.18%, 37.97%, 9.09%, and 14.44%, respectively. However, only LBP-3 was able to decrease the tumor weight significantly in H22 tumor-bearing mice. Meanwhile, all the LBP fractions did not show significant toxicity to murine splenocytes, thymus, and spleen. Taken together, these results demonstrated that the antitumor activity of LBP was closely related to its MW, and LBP-3 with medium MW (40-350 kDa) was the main active fraction. ARTICLE HISTORY