In recent years, universities in Hong Kong have attracted a large number of applicants from the Chinese mainland; however, despite sharing a common ethnicity with the locally born Chinese population of Hong Kong, these migrant students still encounter both linguistic and cross-cultural obstacles to their socialization (Gu 2011). Hong Kong students affected a particular Hong Kong style of code-switching between Cantonese and English (using Cantonese as a sentence base) to present a Hong Kong identity, through which to establish a group boundary (Gu, 2014). Putonghua is seen as an irrelevant language; to these students, not using Putonghua terms in daily intra-group communication is a means of establishing a Hong Kong identity, as opposed to a more generic Chinese one. Mainland Chinese students were found to have set up a Putonghua-speaking community at university, to resist the marginalized status of Putonghua. Furthermore, maintaining that American- or British-accented English is superior to other versions of the language, they practiced speaking ‘standard‘ English in order to establish an international identity, differentiating themselves from Hong Kong peers, who tended to speak Cantonese-accented English (Gu 2014). In addition to these two populations, there is a growing body of international students studying in Hong Kong, which makes the linguistic situation even more complex.With multilingual speakers sharing Chinese ethnicity but having different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, tertiary campuses in Hong Kong are unique multilingual settings, sites full of struggle in relation and response to governmental ideology surrounding multilingualism, public discourse emphasizing the use of English, and diverse language ideologies held by different language-based and cultural groups. As part of a larger project investigating the linguistic ecology of multilingual universities, this study, drawing on notion of symbolic competence (Kramsch and Whiteside 2008) and insights

This chapter presents a qualitative study of the language-related educational experiences of a group of immigrant mainland Chinese students in a multilingual university in Hong Kong. Drawing on interview data, this study explored the construction process of the language ideologies of these students and the social, contextual and interpersonal factors that may influence the construction. This study identified the problems and issues that Hong Kong university academics need to address in order to build a more inclusive learning environment to accommodate the language needs of these Chinese students. Furthermore, this study explored effective ways of maintaining cultural and linguistic diversity in the multilingual universities in an era of globalisation. This study provided implications as to how the immigrant students can employ the multilingual practices as a symbolic resource instead of as a disadvantage constructed by the institutional ideologies. Copyright © 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore.

Over the past few decades, Mainland China has witnessed a massive outflow of students to higher education institutions in Hong Kong. In the context of an up-surge in Mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong, this research aims to explore (1) why Mainland Chinese students choose to study in Hong Kong over other higher education systems, (2) perceptions about the advantages and disadvantages of studying in Hong Kong, and (3) challenges in the process of acculturation from their homeland to Hong Kong. Five key themes are identified: education, finance, learning culture, language, and discrimination/labelling. While Mainland Chinese students often struggle to blend into the new environment, most gradually become accustomed to the local way of life. What remains a challenge is (perceived) discrimination following political tensions over the 'one China, two systems' framework. This paper identifies the expectations and dissatisfactions of the participants with regard to studying in Hong Kong, ultimately offering higher-education administrators an insight into how to better cater for the expanding share of Mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong's universities. This research is significant because it extends the literature by examining acculturation and cultural adaptation issues in an increasingly globalized context.
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Internationalisation has been actively pursued by Hong Kong's universities. Recent years have witnessed quantitative growth in non-local students. To ensure a qualitative success of internationalisation, it is crucial that universities cater for students with diverse academic backgrounds. This research explored challenges to academic adaptation. Focus group interviews were conducted with 124 local, mainland Chinese and international students at four Hong Kong universities. Findings revealed variation in academic adaptation challenges. First, adaptation to an English-medium-of-instruction was a concern for local and mainland Chinese students, while international students noted that limited English proficiency among other students undermined classroom discussions and led to tensions in group projects. Second, local students faced challenges in adapting to a wider range of assessment modes and academic writing, while mainland Chinese and international students reported how teacher-student relations and teaching approaches differed from prior educational experiences. Implications for the delivery of higher education amid internationalisation are discussed.
[Copyright © 2017 European Higher Education Society.]

Drawing on in-depth interview data from 31 mainland Chinese (MLC) students in a Hong Kong university, this article conceptualises MLC and Hong Kong higher education as two dissonant but interrelated subfields of the Chinese higher education field. The article argues that these MLC students' habitus, one that possesses rich economic, social and cultural capital, prompts a strong sense of entitlement to anticipated privileges. However, this sense of entitlement is disrupted by the differential capital valuations across these fields. There is thus notable habitus-field disjuncture, which, exacerbated by the hysteresis effect, gives rise to a sense of disappointment and ambivalence. This article demonstrates how the Hong Kong education credential, which these students initially set out to pursue as a form of capital, can become a disadvantage at multiple levels; the article illustrates that capital valuation and conversion in a transborder context is not a straightforward, but rather a complicated and sometimes contradictory, process.
[© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group]

This presentation embraces two inter-related objectives: to examine the current policies and strategies that are employed by Hong Kong to attract more non-local students in order to become an educational hub in the region, and critique dominant conceptions of ‘higher education’ and the ways these play out in higher education policy. The paper begins by examining ‘markets’ and how this idea cannot be separated from the global dominance of neoliberal ideologies. This is related in turn to questions of policy borrowing. The particular pertinence of this is then emphasised by turning to a topic that, although it may seem a digression, goes to the heart of thinking in social sciences: the nature of humanism in Chinese and Occidental philosophy. Finally a return is made to aspects of international higher education in order to unsettle some of the dominant patterns of influence and open the way towards different kinds of thinking.

An introduction is presented which discusses various articles within the issue on topics including countries participating in large-scale assessments in education on education policy, Programme for International Student Assessment in Hong Kong, and development of regulatory interventions.

This article draws insight from a narrative inquiry to examine the complexities of educating immigrant students with disabilities in which language, culture, and disability collide. Issues related to language-in-education policy, teacher preparation, and the proportion and identification of culturally and linguistically diverse students were primarily reviewed within multicultural and multilingual education conceptual frameworks in English speaking countries between English speaking teachers and non-English speaking students. Little is known about potentially more complicated situations such as those in which teachers and students have a shared ethnicity and dialects with different levels of proficiency. This article thus attempts to illustrate and map the complexity based on the insight from a narrative inquiry situated in an inclusive school setting of Hong Kong. Multiple sources of data were included for a thorough understanding of and analyses on the place, temporality, and sociality within the narrative inquiry framework. Data were drawn from interviews, classroom observations, teacher diaries, school data, and student input. Analyses indicated that shared ethnicity and languages could complicate rather than simplify the teaching and learning contexts. The lived experiences of the special educator demonstrated and contextualised the complex issues of educating CLD children with ADHD of shared ethnicity in multilingual environments. Findings of this inquiry added an important dimension to immigrant and multicultural special education studies and concluded that current inquiry paradigm should be expanded to include shared ethnicity and different proficiency in shared dialects/languages.

The purposes of this study were to find out the differences in academic efficacy, academic adaptation and psychological adaptation between local, Mainland and international students in Hong Kong Universities and major predictors of the psychological and academic adaptation. In addition it explored the level and effect of contact between non-local students and local students. Questionnaires were used to collect data among six UGC-funded local universities in Hong Kong through SurveyMonkey. Findings revealed that Mainland students reported highest level of academic efficacy, academic adaptation and psychological adaptation, followed by international students and local students. In addition, students tended to interact most with those who were from the same cultural backgrounds. Implications for how university policy can better support their students are discussed.