The COVID-19 pandemic has brought various challenges to the education domain globally. This study examines how a group of non-local university students studying at EMI universities in Hong Kong adjusted to the dominant online mode of learning and communication based on their lived experiences in learning and intercultural social networking during the pandemic. Employing the theory of digital literacies and Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and capital, we show how students expanded, redeveloped and transferred existing awareness, knowledge, competences and practices to engage in a range of digitally mediated academic and social activities in this condition. We conclude by discussing how the findings may inform refinement or readjustment of digitalized/zing international higher education. Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Understanding the language demands made on students can help teachers provide pedagogical support during critical transition periods, in turn helping English learners make a smooth transition to the next stage in their education. Through multi-stratal analysis of English textbooks in Hong Kong, this paper elucidated the differences in language demands made of students in different grades, particularly in terms of scope and complexity of choices in register and lexico-grammar. The analysis revealed two critical transition periods: the move from primary to junior secondary school and from junior secondary to senior secondary school. Different linguistic demands during these two transition periods require additional pedagogical support. Furthermore, this paper found a close correlation between the registerial progression indicated by the analysed texts and the learning targets for grades in the mandated English language curriculum. The lexico-grammatical progression revealed contributes to understanding the meaning of more complex stressed in the mandated curriculum. Copyright ©2021 Elsevier.

This study aims at examining how learner L2 oral performance may vary across two different task types in the current school-based assessment initiative being implemented across secondary schools in Hong Kong. The study is innovative in that the tasks in this study involve speaking in a high-stakes language assessment context but they also build on a regular reading and viewing programme integrated into the school curriculum. An in-depth analysis of learner oral linguistic performance on two different task types, i.e., group interaction and individual presentation, from 30 ESL secondary school students, was conducted using a wide range of linguistic measures of accuracy, fluency and complexity derived from previous L2 speaking studies. The analysis shows generally systematic variation in performance dimensions across the two task types, suggesting a trend in the direction of less accuracy, lower fluency and less complex language being associated with the group discussion task. In addition, differences on rater assessments also appeared in the same direction across the two tasks as those differences on the linguistic measures. The results of this study appear to offer little support to the existing categorization of interactive tasks producing greater L2 complexity and accuracy than non-interactive tasks. Implications of the results for both test task development and classroom task design are discussed.
[Copyright © Pergamon Press].