Creativity is an important 21st Century skill that enhances students’ ability to see new opportunities, confront new challenges, and adapt flexibly to the changing study, work and life situations. To nurture students with strong self-efficacy in creative thinking is as important as the contexts and strategies involved in its application. But how to develop sustainable interventions (without generating excessive workload for teachers) to promote students’ self-efficacy in creativity is a long-lasting challenge. This study presents a simple and relatively cost-effective instructional intervention, i.e., self-assessment mind maps, and examines its effect on students’ self-efficacy in creativity, self-efficacy in learning English, and academic performance in English language tests. A pretest-posttest non-equivalent design was adopted for the experimental and control groups of students in a Hong Kong primary school in 2021/22 Spring semester. The results show that students from the experimental group significantly outperformed those from the control group on self-efficacy in creativity after the intervention. However, the intervention did not improve students’ self-efficacy and test performance in English learning. The findings demonstrate the potential of self-assessment mind maps as an effective and sustainable instruction intervention to promote students’ higher-order abilities. This study sheds light on designing sustainable instructional strategies for empowerment in creativity. Copyright © 2022 Yan, Lee, Hui and Lao.

Listening strategies have been explored almost exclusively in contexts where second/foreign (L2) learners listen to audio-recordings. The limited research in understanding teacher input in the classroom is unjustified given how pervasive teacher talk is, particularly in Asian contexts. This area of research is even more scarce in the increasingly popular content and language integrated learning (CLIL) classroom, where students learn content subjects (e.g., science) through their L2. Considering its dual focus on content and L2 learning, it would be interesting to investigate whether CLIL learners may deploy some new listening strategies and how much they are drawing upon their top-down (more meaning-focused) and bottom-up (more language-focused) processing strategies. This study sets out to explore how learners deploy listening strategies to understand teacher talk in the CLIL biology classroom in Hong Kong. Data was collected through lesson observations and stimulated recall interviews with grade 11 students. Findings reveal that students deploy some novel strategies which are more relevant to the CLIL classroom (e.g., decoding subject-specific terminology by breaking down "biodiversity" to "bio" + "diversity"), and these strategies include both top-down and bottom-up ones. There are some teacher-aided strategies such as aided selective attention, which involves the teacher explicitly prompting students to attend to certain keywords. This study, therefore, highlights the interactive nature of listening to the teacher input in the CLIL classroom and the pivotal role of the teacher in achieving the dual goal of content and language learning. Pedagogical implications and professional development in CLIL are highlighted. Copyright © 2020 AsiaTEFL.

With the increasing demand for communicatively competent citizens with global perspectives, culture learning has become an important component in the English language curricula in Hong Kong and mainland China in recent years. This paper will examine how culture is represented in two series of textbooks for junior secondary students in Hong Kong and Shanghai, both published by the same popular publisher. The study adopted Moran’s framework (persons, products, practices, perspectives and communities) and Kachru’s three concentric circles (inner circle, outer circle and expanding circle) to investigate how the authors managed the breadth and depth of cultural presentation. Unlike many previous studies which merely relied on manual analysis, this study combined both manual analysis and corpus linguistic tools to conduct a more comprehensive and objective study. The results show that the Hong Kong series outperformed the Shanghai series in terms of the breadth of the local and foreign cultures represented, as well as in terms of Moran’s cultural dimensions. Nevertheless, both series showed an imbalance in terms of Moran’s cultural aspects, with products (e.g., food, sightseeing places) being the most frequently depicted cultural element, and perspectives the least. This reveals a ‘tourist’s perspective’ and a lack of depth in cultural materials, which may not favour learners’ intercultural communicative competence development. Copyright © 2021 IAFOR.

This article reports on an exploratory study on developing and adopting a ‘Virtual Go Mode’ feature embedded in a mobile vocabulary learning app, VocabGo, to enhance students’ vocabulary learning engagement. Distinguished from other virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) applications, the Virtual Go Mode is designed for students to practice and consolidate their newly learned words via virtual location-based tasks with 360° Google Street View or pre-photographed panoramas. Google Cloud Vision, using an AI model, is embedded to identify objects and their corresponding tasks for students. A total of 15 primary students in Hong Kong participated in this exploratory study for one week. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed. The results showed that students’ vocabulary learning engagement was high when using the Virtual Go Mode. It is suggested that future research focus on empirical studies when designing and implementing virtual location-based tasks supported by VR technologies in class to provide opportunities for students to practice and consolidate newly learned words and enhance their learning engagement after the COVID-19 pandemic. Copyright © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

The recent decades have seen enthusiastic calls for reconceptualizing English as a foreign language (EFL) education, taking into account the current socio-lingual status of English and how it is used genuinely for communication interculturally and internationally. However, a wide gap still exists between promulgation such as intelligibility over nativelikeness in pronunciation instruction and realities in the EFL classroom. The study investigated pre- and in-service teachers' cognition about accents and the incorporation of different accents in their classrooms. One hundred and sixty-six EFL teachers (89 pre-service and 77 in-service) from Hong Kong and Guangdong (a province in China) completed a questionnaire. Contrary to expectations, the teachers' overall attitude was neutral rather than positive towards General American (GA) / Received Pronunciation (RP)(1) associated with EFL teachers' accents and EFL education. Only two thirds of the teachers were certain about which accents to use and to teach in listening and pronunciation lessons (i.e. as many as one third were uncertain). Also, the participants were neutral about incorporating non-GA/RP accents into EFL lessons, with around one third objecting to doing so. Although no differences were found between pre- and in-service teachers' cognition, additional analysis revealed that teachers' individual background variables, namely teaching experience, self-rated language proficiency, and knowledge of sound systems (IPA for English; pinyin for Mandarin), have significant correlations with their cognition. Copyright ©2021 SAGE Publications.