Editorial: Foreign Language Teaching and Learning in Chinese Higher Education: Emerging Challenges

Wei Xu^1*Ping Wu²

• ¹City University of Macau, Macao, Macao, SAR China
• ²Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, China

Foreign-language education has perennially been a strategic priority in China, but the last decade has seen an unprecedented convergence of pressures: hyperglobalization, the Belt & Road Initiative, the national "Double First-Class" agenda, curriculum-ideology mandates, demographic change in the student population, and a tidal wave of educational technologies crowned by generative artificial intelligence (AI) (Lei & Qin, 2022;Zhou & Hou, 2025). Amidst this turbulence, conventional examination-driven pedagogies, standardized curricula, and one-size-fits-all assessment are ever more in conflict with learner diversity, labor-market uncertainty, and internationalization agendas.It is against this background that the current Research Topic invites empirical and theoretical research that would interrogate, explain, and ultimately contribute to managing these tensions from both the learner and teacher angles. Following a stringent peer review, sixteen papers were accepted in three Frontiers journals (Psychology, Education, and Language Sciences). Collectively, they offer a panoramic overview of where the field is now, where the gaps lie, and the way it is likely to go. To provide a coherent synthesis of the findings presented in this special issue, and to reflect the multifaceted nature of the research, we group the sixteen papers into four overlapping clusters: (1) affective-motivational dynamics;(2) policy, ideology, and curriculum;(3) technology-mediated teaching and learning; and (4) classroom environment, pedagogy, and assessment. This thematic organization not only clarifies the main research avenues, but also underscores the interconnections among them.While presented in isolation here, these threads often overlap within single studies-a testament to the systemic intricacy of foreign-language teaching today. The first cluster foregrounds the crucial role of affect and motivation in foreignlanguage learning, an area marked by increasing theoretical and empirical sophistication. Building on the affective-motivational findings, the second cluster turns to the macro-level forces shaping foreign-language education in China today. Hu H. et al. Responding to the digital transformation sweeping through education, the third cluster examines how technology is reshaping both the practice and perception of language teaching and learning. Yan et al. use metaphor analysis with 281 undergraduates to reveal ambivalent conceptualizations of generative AI-ranging from "tool" and "brain" to "medicine" and even "addictive drink." Tian & Wang adapt the GETAMEL framework to investigate interpreting instructors' uptake of tablets for digital note-taking, identifying perceived ease of use, facilitating conditions and social Wu qualitatively remodels the reading-to-write process, identifying recursive planning and rereading loops that bridge source comprehension with target production-insights valuable for e-portfolio and AI-assisted writing platforms. Crosscutting insight: Technology affordances are expanding faster than pedagogical capacity or infrastructure; success hinges on instructor digital competence, institutional policy and learners' critical data literacy. Taken together, these articles indicate that technology affordances are outstripping pedagogical capacity or infrastructure; success is contingent upon instructor digital literacy, institutional policy and learners' critical data literacy. The articles also underscore the need to resolve ambivalent attitudes towards technology, so that innovation is converted into valuable learning experiences. Finally, the fourth cluster brings the focus back to the micro-level of the classroom, where the interplay of environment, pedagogy, and assessment shapes the lived experiences of students and teachers. Ye synthesizes decades of research on classroom environment (CE) effects on engagement, calling for multi-layered interventionsfrom seating arrangements to teacher emotional labor-to engineer "positive CE." Lo & Shi demonstrate, through mixed-methods data on 310 Hong Kong undergraduates, that reading contemporary English fiction within a content-based ESL course promotes not only language skills but also empathy and reflective thinking. These findings reaffirm the centrality of classroom climate and pedagogical design, while highlighting the value of literature and content-based instruction in fostering both linguistic and socio-emotional growth. Across these studies, a number of key conclusions can be drawn. Affective wellbeing emerges as foundational; from PBCL to EMI classrooms, emotion regulation, enjoyment, and self-efficacy consistently trump purely cognitive variables in the prediction of performance and engagement. Policy in Chinese higher education is multi-vector, drawn toward international benchmarks like global rankings and Englishmedium instruction but also drawn to respond to domestic ideological imperatives, with the consequence that curricular hybrids are still under construction. Technology appears double-edged: digital note-taking, translanguaging software, and particularly generative AI hold out the promise of personalized, multimodal learning but also bring threats of dependency, ethical compromise, and inequitable access. Last, learner diversity is increasing; regional, gender, personality, and disciplinary differences now forge distinctive motivational pathways (Xu, 2025), so that "massified" higher education can no longer be served by one-size-fits-all solutions.4 Future Directions: Confronting the AI Frontier Though numerous contributions brush up against AI, the field is still in an exploratory stage, and we outline five high-priority research directions in the near term.First, the establishment of key AI literacy and academic integrity frameworks is crucial (Abuadas & Albikawi, 2025;Dou et al., 2024). Students need to be instructed not just in using ChatGPT-like tools but also in critiquing, verifying, and ethically incorporating AI-generated content (Batool et al., 2024), and research in the near term should investigate detection versus education responses to plagiarism and "prompt engineering" concerns (Nugumanova et al., 2025). Second, adaptive, context-aware feedback is worthy of more attention (Ni & Xu, 2025), including investigations of large-languagemodel feedback attuned to Chinese learners' interlanguage levels, particularly for lessresourced languages like Italian or Portuguese, and exploring teacher-AI co-feedback models concerning workload, trust, and learning outcomes (Huang et al., 2025) Methodologically, the discipline can benefit from additional mixed-methods (Mahapatra, 2024), classroom-based experimentation (Oubibi, 2024), cross-regional comparative investigations (Sukjairungwattana et al., 2025), and an adherence to openscience practices such as preregistration and data sharing, which will hasten cumulative knowledge and incremental progress. The sixteen articles gathered in this Research Topic collectively illuminate the multi-layered challenges-and nascent opportunities-facing foreign language education in Chinese higher education. They show that affective wellbeing, policy alignment, technological agility and culturally responsive pedagogy are not ancillary but central to cultivating the multilingual (Chen et al., 2025), interculturally competent graduates demanded by both national agendas and global labor markets (Kim et al., 2024).As generative AI rapidly redefines what it means to learn, teach and use a foreign language, the community must move beyond either-or debates toward evidence-based, ethically grounded integration strategies. We hope the insights offered here will catalyze such work and serve as a reference point for scholars, practitioners and policymakers committed to navigating the next decade of foreign-language education in China.