Residential halls have been seen as an essential microsystem that can promote desirable academic, personal, and social outcomes. However, the extent to which residential education maps onto universities’ educational aims remains ambiguous. Therefore, a study was conducted in two stages, using a mixed-method approach to examine the strength of the alignment between universities’ educational aims and residential educational aims among four government-funded universities in Hong Kong. The results clarify the nature of residential educational aims and found that educators should avoid projecting an ultimate set of residential educational aims onto every institution regardless of the underlying conditions and settings. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

The study was conducted under the backdrop of the increasing demand of Mandarin-learning in Scotland and Hong Kong. Inspired by Gardner’s (2010) socio-educational model, this study is the first to compare students’ integrative motivation towards learning Mandarin under the two contexts. The data was obtained from a total of 132 secondary school students (54 from Hong Kong, and 78 from Scotland) through questionnaires. It also aimed to examine the robustness and culture-specific applicability of the model. Due to the geographical proximity and cultural similarity to Chinese, the integrativeness of non-Chinese speaking (NCS) students in Hong Kong is expected to be relatively higher compared to the students in Scotland. However, the results showed that NCS students displayed lower integrative motivation than students in Scotland. The significant difference we identified lay upon one of the constructs - fear of assimilation. This unexpected phenomenon could invite more in-depth studies on factors affecting integrative motivation in learning Mandarin.漢語作為第二語言的學習日益普及，無論是香港的非華語學生，或是全球的「漢語熱」，都顯示需求日益增長。本研究以Gardner（2010）的社會教育模式為理論基礎，比較了兩種語境下學生學習普通話的綜合動機。 是次研究的數據來自132 名中學生（54 名香港非華語學生，78 名蘇格蘭本地學生）的問卷調查結果。本研究還旨在了解社會教育模型在特定文化的適用性。由於香港地理上相鄰內地，文化亦相似，所以香港非華語學生的綜合性預期會比蘇格蘭的學生高。然而，結果卻顯示非華語學生的綜合動機較蘇格蘭學生為低。我們發現的顯著差異在於其中一個建構因素─對同化的恐懼。這個現象能讓我們對綜合動機及跨文化的因素進行更深入的研究。 Copyright © 2021 香港教育大學中國語言學系、哥倫比亞大學中文部、中華書局（香港）有限公司.

The growing complexity of doing a PhD necessarily demands candidates to robustly exercise their agency in navigating the doctoral journey. However, the conceptualisation of how students use their agency across multiple facets of their studies has yet to receive due scholarly attention. Drawing on the subject-centred sociocultural view on agency, this study analysed life story interviews conducted with 16 doctoral students in Hong Kong. Findings show that participants’ agency was manifested both in socially and collectively organised enterprises (proactive engagement in a wide array of developmental opportunities, responsiveness to situational research problems, contestation against unsupportive institutional cultures) and as individual-level strategic perspectives and actions (self-management of everyday emotions, imaginative construction of post-graduation prospects). Concurrently, the results shed light on the inextricable and complex linkages between the enactment of agency and the personal, relational, institutional, and broader higher education conditions delimiting students’ lived experiences of candidature. Implications for educational practices and future research beneficial to develop doctoral agency are discussed. Copyright © 2022 Informa UK Limited.