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Time-travel television dramas have recently gained tremendous popularity worldwide. Defying stereotypes of romance TV dramas as women’s genres, time-travel romance TV drama genres seem to have attracted young men and women of different walks of life. Informed by positioning theory and Bakhtin’s heteroglossic dialogism, this study investigates a group of bilingual Mainland Chinese, heterosexual postgraduate students’ consumption of a Chinese time-travel TV drama, Scarlet Heart. It is found that well-educated Mainland Chinese women and men are still confronted with dilemmas of gender role boundaries and pressure to subscribe to traditional gender values. However, the time-travel TV drama has enabled the interviewees to negotiate new gender relations when they assign different positions to the female protagonist and themselves in the discussion. It is therefore proposed that time-travel TV dramas can be appropriated as dialogic resources for ideological becoming and critical literacy activities for facilitating construction of alternative subject positions and identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Lemke's (1990) "thematic patterns" theory, this research proposes a "Concept + Language Mapping" (CLM) approach and tried it out in an English Medium Instruction (EMI) biology classroom in Hong Kong. Lessons were observed and samples of student work were collected during the intervention with student/teacher interviews conducted afterwards. A quasi-experimental design was also adopted to estimate the impact of the CLM approach. The analysis indicated that CLM facilitated the development of both content and language knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, an excerpt of teacher–student interaction in an EFL junior secondary science classroom in Hong Kong is analysed using the conversation analytic method of sequential analysis. The fine-grained analysis reveals that in the teacher's effort to engage her students in the co-construction of a scientific proof, the students' familiar everyday discourses (e.g. students' examples and experiences as expressed in their familiar language) need to be allowed to play a significant role. It also shows how translanguaging can be well-coordinated with multimodal practices (using blackboard drawings, gestures) to facilitate students' meaning-making in the inquiry-based teacher–student dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary TESOL methodologies have been characterized by compartmentalization of languages in the classroom. However, recent years have seen the beginning signs of paradigmatic change in TESOL methodologies that indicate a move toward plurilingualism. In this article, the author draws on the case of Hong Kong to illustrate how, in the past four decades, deep-rooted ideologies of linguistic purism combined with dominant TESOL knowledge claims have made it difficult to develop locally appropriate methodologies. She outlines the innovative work of some teachers who build up plurilingual pedagogies in content classrooms despite these difficulties, and on this basis proposes suggestions for future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper messages from viewers of the popular Korean historical TV drama — Dae Jang Geum (Da Chang Jin) — in a Hong Kong web-based discussion forum are analyzed to see how some Hong Kong viewers construct their Chinese cultural identities through discursive moves of positioning (Harrè and van Langenhove, 1999). Different subject positions are adopted by these forum discussion participants to draw, maintain, and shift the boundary between “self” and “other” in different storylines projected in their messages. In asserting their Chinese cultural identities they also seem to be engaged in discursive construction of cultural others (e.g. Japanese, Koreans). We problematize these constructions as double-edged in their possible consequences: while they seem to cultivate a sense of Chinese cultural solidarity (albeit only temporarily), they also show the danger of constructing a hegemonic Sino-centric discourse of Great China culturalism. The cultural identification patterns of these Hong Kong viewers also seem to be unstable, ambivalent and contradictory, perhaps reflecting Hong Kong people’s general sense of ambivalence and fluidity in their negotiation of cultural identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the colonial history of university education in Hong Kong, and recent changes in the governance of university education driven by global management discourses are discussed. With the systemic penetration of global economic rationalism, Hong Kong university education has gone through structural changes that include funding-linked evaluative policies and practices. Market imperatives and institutionally defined notions of research performance based mainly on English-language, overseas journal publications are exerting strong influence on the cultural practices and life styles of academics and stand to significantly change academic and intellectual culture in higher education in Hong Kong. The long-term consequences of these local interpretations and adaptations of global processes will be discussed in terms of their potential impact on academic freedom, the shaping of intellectual space, the intensification of competitive institutional research output, and the risk of privileging certain forms of knowledge production that puts aside local societal needs, indigenous knowledge and epistemologies. The views of experienced Hong Kong academics in the humanities and social sciences, as expressed in in-depth individual interviews, are also discussed. These are then interpreted with reference to Habermas' notion of different kinds of knowledge-constitutive interests (Habermas 1971) and Foucault's notion of the technology of discipline power to uncover the state's implicit transformation and shaping of the social and epistemological bases of academic and intellectual pursuits and the increasing trend of individualization of intellectual communities into isolated, individualistic, competitive knowledge workers (Foucault 1977). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gendered nature of modernity in the European Enlightenment tradition has naturalized and institutionalized an essentialist, binary system of masculinity and femininity. A similarly hierarchicalized, binary system of gender role relationships also underlies the Confucianist social order in East Asian cultural traditions. Our recent study of some educated, Chinese, heterosexual men's consumption of Korean TV dramas in the late/post-industrial (but not post-capitalist) society of Hong Kong, however, shows that while the binary gender boundaries are increasingly being destabilized and crossed over in their everyday lived experiences, these boundaries are also simultaneously being nostalgically hung onto by some of the men in their pleasurable consumption of Korean dramas. The implications of their consumption practices are discussed in terms of the dilemmas faced by some Hong Kong men when they are confronted with the increasing destabilization of the gender role boundaries and how they use Korean dramas to negotiate new gender relations in modern day Hong Kong society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes to overcome the traditional essentialist and dichotomous ways of conceptualising language and language pedagogies, i.e. to go beyond linguistic purist perspectives. Analysing bilingual teaching practices in a science lesson, the paper proposes that practical bilingual pedagogies can be developed to help students in bilingual education programmes to access dominant linguistic resources and discourses by capitalising on their indigenous linguistic and cultural resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In transitional societies where political pressure on the press is coupled with a commercial media system and a professional journalistic culture, the politics of self-censorship is likely to involve a strategic contest between the media and political actors. Language plays a significant role in this contest. The present study focuses on the case of Hong Kong. It analyzes how two local newspapers, facing an important yet sensitive political issue, constructed two different overall storylines and used two different sets of discursive strategies in their editorials to handle political pressure, market credibility, and journalistic integrity simultaneously. The elite-oriented Ming Pao constructed a storyline of the debate as a factional struggle in order to posit itself as an impartial arbitrator. This approach was further sustained and justified by the discursive strategies of balanced and qualified criticisms and the rhetoric of rational discussion. The mass-oriented Apple Daily, on the other hand, constructed a storyline of a sovereign people whose rights are encroached upon by a powerful entity. The paper was therefore much more critical towards the power center. Nevertheless, it also appropriated the dominant discourse, constructed internal contradictions, and decentralized the Chinese central government to smooth out the radicalism of its criticisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I describe the mocking and playful verbal practices of some Cantonese working-class secondary schoolboys in an English language lesson in Hong Kong. I show how these Cantonese-speaking adolescents seek to assert their indigenous identity and their ingenious Cantonese competence in an educational system that places Cantonese at the bottom of the hierarchy of languages. These self-asserting verbal practices of working- class schoolboys, while in themselves artful and playful, do not contribute to the breaking through of the reproduction and perpetuation of these schoolboys' subordinated and insulated Cantonese sociocultural world, where there is little access to the socioeconomically dominant symbolic resource of English. Without access to English, they can hardly access the middle-class bilingual identity and the socioeconomic success and social status that come with it. Paradoxically, by acting out resistance to an alienating English curriculum, they contribute to the perpetuation of their own insularity and subordination and are trapped in a cycle of disadvantage. The paper concludes with a discussion of the possible impact of the transition of Hong Kong from a British colony to a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China on language, identity, and social class in post-1997 Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I analyse pupil-teacher dialogue, in a mixture of English and Cantonese, from a segment of a Form 2 (Grade 8,13-14 yrs) English reading lesson. The lesson was videotaped in a working-class school in Hong Kong, and the excerpt is taken from a larger corpus of similar lesson data videotaped in the class over three consecutive weeks. The analysis shows how these Cantonese children, with limited English, succeeded in subverting the reading lesson, which was based entirely on information extraction tasks. Instead, they negotiated their own preferred comic-style narratives by cleverly making use of the response slots of the IRF (Initiation-Response-Feedback) discourse format used in the lesson. Thus they achieved genuinely creative responses, in spite of the curriculum. The implications for teaching are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the result of a study citing the diversity of discursive practices in a similarly constrained classrooms during English lessons in schools that are located in different socioeconomic areas in Hong Kong, China. It is observed that majority of the students in one classroom speak mostly Cantonese at home but sometimes also speak English with their Filipino domestic helpers. For students in another schoolroom, they speak only Cantonese at home and watched the news on television. The author noticed that the English fluency of students in Classroom C were limited. For Classroom D students, their socioeconomic backgrounds and their sociolinguistic and extracurricular literacy habits are the same of those in Classroom B and C.