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This article reflects upon the processes and challenges of building a digital archive of English learning narratives, and engages with broader questions surrounding the collection and presentation of student narratives on an online platform. It also discusses the potential uses of the open-access archive in a global context. The archive hosts over 3000 student narratives collected in diverse leisure, educational, professional and cross-cultural settings in Hong Kong. The diverse learning strategies, approaches and challenges that students share thus provide a holistic record of second language learning practices in various contexts, thereby serving as a useful reference for educators, students and independent learners when they develop their own teaching and learning strategies and approaches.

The present study contributes to a well-established line of applied linguistics research in educational contexts on how teachers can make connections between their students' out-of-school knowledge and experiences and what they learn in the classroom by examining a hitherto under-explored context, namely English-medium-instruction (EMI) mathematics classes in Hong Kong (HK). Adopting a translanguaging perspective, the study examines how fluid and dynamic meaning-making practices afford opportunities for teachers to bring the outside into the EMI classroom in order to support the students' learning of new academic knowledge. The data for the present paper is based on a linguistic ethnography project in a HK secondary school where EMI is practised. Multimodal Conversation Analysis is carried out on the classroom interactional data, triangulated with the video-stimulated-recall-interview data analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The findings demonstrate how the teacher constructs a translanguaging space by integrating the students’ everyday life experience in an institutional learning space. It is argued that translanguaging thus helps to transform the EMI classroom into a lived experience, which in turn enhances content learning. The theoretical and pedagogical implications for EMI in other contexts are explored.

The present study aims to use a genre-based functional grammar approach to examine how grammar instruction can help improve Hong Kong English learners' story writing performance. Four classes of Secondary 1 (Grade 7) students participated in the study, with one class being the control group. The experimental groups received instructions in a research lesson that highlighted the impact of their choice of process types on story writing, while the control group did not receive any functional grammar instruction. A comparison of the writing performance of the experimental groups in the pre- and post-lesson tests revealed significant improvement, while no progress was found with the control group. The test results were triangulated with the students' class writing and homework, and nine selected students' pre- and post-lesson interview data. The findings revealed students' heightened awareness of the impact of the choice of various processes on writing. The study also found that lower achievers gained substantial benefits from the explicit writing instruction. This study provides insights to ESL/EFL teachers about how to use functional grammar as a pedagogical tool to enhance learners' story writing skills.

Intelligibility, usually defined as the ability of the listener to recognize words and utterances, is an important consideration for international communication in English. Most research studies have focused on international intelligibility, involving speakers from different language backgrounds. However, there have been few studies of intranational intelligibility, and little is known about how well speakers from ‘the same’ language background understand one another. This study investigated the relationship between accent features and intranational intelligibility by providing 91 listeners in Hong Kong with a range of speech samples taken from Hong Kong media broadcasts in English. These samples contained different combinations of accent features, reflecting different kinds of Hong Kong English accents. Listeners were required to produce orthographic transcripts of the speech samples. Transcript analysis produced a list of words that were frequently mistranscribed, and identification of the accent features involved showed that consonantal modifications were often associated with intelligibility problems. The findings suggest that certain L1-related accent features are capable of reducing intranational intelligibility, as are other accent features and speech processes used by both L1 and L2 English speakers. The study has implications for pronunciation pedagogy, and for those involved with intranational and international communication in English.

This paper describes an investigation into the type of listening test that might serve as an assessment instrument of English language teachers as part of a teacher certification test — the Hong Kong English Language Benchmark Test. The paper first describes the benchmarking initiative in Hong Kong to orient the reader to the nature and purpose of the Listening Test. The paper then describes a case study where groups of pre-service and in-service English language teachers were administered audio and video versions of the same test, after which a survey was conducted of their opinion of the audio/video mode of assessing listening. Scores on the two test modes (as well as on an anchor test) indicated no significant differences between the two scores of the two groups. Further, although some of the test takers from the audio test-taking group said they would have preferred to have taken the test via video, the video test-taking group felt that not only had they gained no advantage from the video mode, they felt they might have done better had they not been distracted by the visual images, and by having to look up and down from question paper to screen. As a high-stakes certification test for English language teachers, the conclusion that is drawn is that the listening comprehension test should be implemented via an audio, and not video, mode.

This paper reviews the use of mixed-code teaching in Hong Kong schools. The situation of English language teaching is complicated, since English must be preserved for business purposes, but the Chinese medium of instruction is receiving greater emphasis as Hong Kong nears the date of its takeover by China. The government has consistently advocated either the Chinese or English medium in education and has condemned using a mixed-code of Cantonese and English. Despite government policy, teachers have increased their use of mixed-code in the classroom. Academics have supported the teachers' practice with research that favours mixed-code for Hong Kong's complex language teaching situation. Nevertheless, the government's Education Commission, in a series of reports, has refused to change its position on mixed-code teaching. The article outlines the efforts of educators interested in languages in contact to persuade the government to accept mixed-code as not only inevitable, but as preferable in most Hong Kong schools.

This paper describes how a hypertext database Focus on Writing was created to assist English language teachers of Hong Kong secondary schools in the teaching of continuous writing. Focus on Writing is subsumed under the TeleNex Teaching Resources database, which is part of the TeleNex network. This network aims to provide continuous professional support to English language teachers in their own workplace through the computer. The Focus on Writing database is still in the process of development and constant revision of the hypertext format is taking place based on the feedback from users. This paper delineates the theoretical and practical rationale behind the evolving design of the Focus on Writing database, outlining the ways in which a hypertext format differs from the print medium. The emerging issues of this technology are discussed with reference to the advantages this kind of technology offers in providing English language teachers of Hong Kong with a coherent model of L2 writing pedagogy.