In this paper, I analyze the recent official, academic, and media discourses in Hong Kong to examine how the 'language problem' has been formulated and represented, and to expose and problematize the models of language, learning, and education that are being imposed by these public discourses. I seek to examine the role these discourses play in producing and perpetuating false consciousness or popular taken-for-granted notions about language and language learning among Hong Kong people. I conclude with a proposal of alternative models to the dominant ones.

In traditional politeness theories, disagreements are face threatening acts, regarded as dispreferred options from a conversation analysis approach. However, in the classroom context, specifically in Language Education, it is often necessary for teachers to disagree with students. Previous studies of classroom disagreement have shown that teachers use linguistic markers to mitigate the face threat inherent in disagreements. In Hong Kong, we would also expect a significant use of mitigating lexical strategies as Asian cultures are typically regarded as being conflict-avoiding. However, as hand gestures and head movements have been observed to accompany negative linguistic markers to stress the lexical or pragmatic meaning of the utterance, they could be an alternative modality to communicate disagreement in the Hong Kong classroom. This study analyzed teacher disagreements in 10 h of Language Education classroom teaching in a Hong Kong higher education institution. The results suggest that disagreements are indeed dispreferred options in this particular context and that the salience of the act itself is minimized by avoiding negative gestures or head movements. As this behavior was observed among all teachers who disagreed, it is proposed that this behavior has been conventionalized within this community of practice.
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