Today’s learning environments are providing unique challenges and opportunities for learners to interact with different technologies in meaningful, relevant, and innovative ways. The advent of digital educational game-based technologies has precipitated a growing need for faculty to engage learners and keep them motivated and challenged. In digital game-based active learning, immersion and flow are two essential elements of the player experience that occur during game play. Both these concepts are theoretically distinct, but significantly related from an empirical perspective. Immersion focuses on sensory cues that engage the player’s mind via sensory stimulation, such as how involved the player is in the gaming experience and what response is expected on the part of the player. Flow centers on the cognitive aspects of the gaming experience, emphasizing the relationship between a challenging activity and the skills of a player, but also comprising of engagement, control, challenge, and feedback. A motivation for using digital games to support learning is that well designed game-based learning can provide experiences of immersion and flow, thereby simulating authentic problem-solving tasks that combine instruction, learning, and assessment. Players are immersed through interactive " game-like” activities in a competitive game play format and subsequently driven by optimally challenging tasks. Hence, digital game-based learning technologies have the means to immerse players by retaining motivation within the game by providing mastery feedback at multiple levels. Using Badaboom!, a game-based classroom response system developed by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, this paper sets forth a conceptual framework for immersion and flow in digital game-based learning. Copyright © 2019 Common Ground Research Networks, Ronnie H. Shroff, Fridolin S. Z. Ting, Wai Hung Lam, Some Rights Reserved (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

This study aims to investigate and compare the relationship between immersion and motivation in two different groups of student teachers who enrolled in an immersion programme. With a group of student teachers whose social and cultural backgrounds are different – one group is from Mainland China and one is from Hong Kong – though they both are of Chinese ethnicity and speak the same Chinese variety, the reasons behind their studying a postgraduate programme and going on an immersion can be different. The method of data collection adopted for this study was a qualitative paradigm. In-depth interviews, both pre- and post-immersion, were conducted. Participants were also encouraged to send e-mails to the researcher during immersion that reflected on their experience. Results show that Mainland participants were motivated by desires to enhance their pedagogical knowledge in EFL teaching in order to satisfy implementation constraints in their homeland. In contrast, Hong Kong participants were primarily interested in improving their language proficiency in order to satisfy the mandatory language assessment required for graduation. Both groups, however, saw cultural enrichment as their secondary reason for undertaking immersion, in that it allowed them to better understand the culture behind the language and thus become better English teachers. Copyright © 2019 Academy Publication.

This study studied the accent perception of a group of non-native pre-service EFL teachers in Hong Kong in order to see whether native English norm is of their preference for teaching and learning. Results found that participants all preferred traditional native English as learning model and seemed to have overlooked the principle of intelligibility, even there had been calls for using lingua franca core as learning model. Results show that participants all preferred using native English to be the model of teaching and learning. Among all the native English varieties, participants preferred the accent from the United Kingdom though not all could identify the accent they preferred. The study showed there was a mismatch between what the participants preferred and their ability of identifying accents of different kinds. Copyright © 2018 Academy Publication.

The present study evaluates the impact of the fine-tuning medium of instruction (MOI) policy in Hong Kong in the early stages of its implementation. It explores the key stakeholders' perspectives on a school-based policy via a case study, which gathered multiple sources of qualitative data (i.e. focus groups/interviews, open-ended questionnaires, school documents and lesson observations). The findings reveal that the increased amount of English-medium teaching encouraged by the new policy has led to the emergence of numerous controversial pedagogical and practical issues, many of which resemble those also occurring in bilingual education programmes worldwide. The evidence suggests that the school-based MOI policy and practices have only benefited the more capable students but sacrificed the interests and learning needs of less able students. The paper, therefore, highlights the need to inform local teachers and administrators on how to confront these difficulties based on their own experience so as to maximise the effectiveness and learning outcomes of the majority of the students.
[Copyright of Language and Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2014.904872]

Attempting to provide a smooth transition between primary schooling in Chinese and secondary schooling in English, the theory and basic principles of an English immersion "Bridge Program" for Hong Kong children are introduced by the authors.