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This paper aims to understand the structure and determinants of international bank l ending among APEC economies. Specifically، this paper first aims to analyze whether Australia; Canada; Japan; Chinese Taipei; and the United States، which are the only APEC members for which international borrowing data are available، tend to lend more intensively to other APEC members than to non-APEC countries . This paper finds that the estimate for the APEC membership dummy in the equation for outward bank lending is positive and statistically significant، but the estimate for the APEC membership dummy becomes insignificant when a bilateral trade intensity variable is added، suggesting that closer ties in bank lending (outward) among APEC member economies are mostly due to closer ties in trade in goods . On the other hand، the estimates for the APEC membership dummy in the inward equation are negative and significant. This suggests that the 21 APEC member economies borrow more from non-APEC member economies than from the five APEC members . Finally، the five APEC member economies make fewer loans to the economies with a greater country risk. When the three disaggregated risk measures are added in the regression alternatively and concurrently، it is found that bank lending is positively associated with political and economic risks، but is negatively associated with financial risk. Thus، bank lenders from the five APEC member economies appear to make a proper assessment of the political and economic risks when making international loans

With the current availability of state-of-the-art technology, particularly the Internet, people have expanded their channels of communication. This has similarly led to many people utilizing technology to learn second/foreign languages. Nevertheless, many current computer-assisted language learning (CALL) programs still appear to be lacking in interactivity and what is termed social presence, which is in turn an obstacle to the learners assuming active roles in their online experience of L2 learning. Consequently, the existing CALL programs do not seem to have updated themselves from the obsolete behavioristic and communicative genres to reach for the integrative one to yield optimum interactivity. The present study has attempted to cast light on the prospect of creating an online learning community that could optimize the patterns of interaction among the students and the teacher with the intention of creating online social presence. Using a qualitative research based on grounded theory, the researchers attempted to collect and analyze the data vis-à-vis the participants’ feedback on the research questions that were cyclically obtained from 42 English students of the first researcher’s weblog through 41 semi-structured interviews at the end of each virtual class on Skype and Discord over one year. The results suggested that content-based instruction (CBI) in which the students can opt for and create the content of the course through engaging in asynchronous activities and performing peer-assessment in the comment forms and discussion boards before practicing negotiation of meaning in each synchronous class could maximize the level of student-student interactivity and social presence among the L2 learners.