Faculty Publications and Conference Presentations

The Standards for Chinese Language Proficiency in International Chinese Education (the Standards) provide essential guidance for textbook development. During the revision of our language center textbooks, the Standards’ quantitative language indicators informed the process. The revised content reflected students’ diverse backgrounds by including both mainland Chinese society and Hong Kong’s local customs. Language learning focused on communicative tasks based on thematic and functional approaches. Incorporating morpheme analysis into vocabulary instruction aimed to develop students’ word-formation skills for autonomous learning, supported by blended learning, micro-teaching, and AI tools to enhance communication skills efficiently.

Students today will be treading a career path that doesn’t exist yet. Here’s how to encourage them to develop the agility and resilience they’ll need for an uncertain world

<p>British higher education institutions attract a large number of international students, especially Chinese students, to pursue degrees in the UK every year. This longitudinal mixed-methods study tracked the informal language contact and social networks of Chinese foundation program students in the UK for two terms. A Language Contact Questionnaire and a Study Abroad Social Network Survey were administered to 84 students and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 26 participants in the first term and the second term of study. Data revealed that the participants generally had a high percentage of L1 use, high academic L2 contact, and mainly L1 social networks during studying abroad, with little variation over the two terms. Their relationships with international friends were superficial and a vibrant international student community was not found. L2 topic multiplexity and online L2 contact frequency weakly predicted the total informal L2 contact at Term 1 and Term 2. This study underscores that degree-oriented SA participants may have different prioritization and leisure time routines compared with summer school participants or exchange students abroad. Thus, with an extra foundation year in the host country, the current sample seemed to prioritize academic preparation, rather than social integration.</p>

<p>The benefits of using digital storytelling are well documented in the literature. Whether and how these advantages can be extended to digital story-writing, especially for young learners, remains underexplored. Recent advancement in technology has the potential of streamlining the stages of planning and revising in a process approach to second language writing. The present study examined how English teachers in two Hong Kong primary schools adopted a process approach to teach digital story-writing. They planned eight writing lessons for 10 Primary 3–4 classes. Students were taught to use Google Slides to write their stories on iPads and complete a recording in small groups, which were then published on an online platform. Findings from focus-group interviews, lesson observations and student writings revealed that students were highly engaged in the lessons, and their writings also had fewer grammatical mistakes. However, they rarely engaged in meaningful dialogues during group work, whilst some teachers also expressed concerns about time constraints and their own readiness to use digital story-writing, which may hinder successful implementation of this innovative approach in classroom settings. Implications of how digital story-writing can be effectively deployed on young learners are discussed.</p>