Emotions have received widespread attention in the education field globally thanks to the greater emphasis on well-being in recent times. Against this backdrop and the fact that foreign language (FL) education is increasingly common from a young age, this study set out to investigate what FL classroom activities children find most enjoyable and most boring, and why. Ninety-eight Grade-5 English-as-a-FL learners in Hong Kong participated in this study. The participants put forward 18 activities that they thought were most enjoyable, especially games and videos (together making up about 49% of the responses) . Fifteen activities were deemed most boring, especially writing and dictation (together 45% of the responses). Fun , knowledge-gaining , and opportunities for interaction were among the most common reasons given for activities being enjoyable, while difficult , troublesome , and tiring were the main descriptors of the activities they thought were boring. Copyright ©2024 Springer.

This paper contributes to our conceptualization of linguistic identities in English as a lingua franca (ELF) communication by analyzing a group of multilingual international students' narrativized accounts of their ELF communication experiences in an international university in Hong Kong. The findings of the study indicate that despite their status as L2 speakers, the participants considered themselves as legitimate speakers of English when interacting with others through ELF. Moreover, they oriented to their national cultural identities and personal identities indexed through their accents in ELF communication. Their frequent use of ELF with other students from diverse linguacultural backgrounds also prompted them to identify positively with a local ELF-using community and envision their imagined identities as members of a global ELF-using community. The findings further reveal that the participants' ELF communication experiences opened up a space for them to take on new and alternative L2-speaking personal identities which they perceived to be markedly different from and more desirable than their L1-based selves. Overall, the analysis provides empirical support for applying a tripartite model of linguistic identity for understanding ELF communication experiences and calls attention to the multidimensional nature of linguistic identities and the interrelatedness between different dimensions of linguistic identities in ELF communication. Copyright ©2024 Routledge.

Most speakers' first language (L1) in Hong Kong and Guangdong China is Cantonese. Even though the L1 of both Guangdong Cantonese speakers and Hong Kong Cantonese speakers is the same, their second languages (L2) belong to different language families. Previous studies have pointed out that L2 status in third language (L3) acquisition is a salient factor. This study aimed to: (1) examine Guangdong Cantonese speakers' pronunciation error patterns in their L2 Mandarin and L3 English and explore the language interaction patterns among these three languages; (2) compare the findings with those of Hong Kong Cantonese speakers whose L2 is English and L3 Mandarin in Chen and Han (2019. L3 phonology: contributions of L1 and L2 to L3 pronunciation learning by Hong Kong speakers. International Journal of Multilingualism, 16(4), 492-512. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2019.1573901) to identify the roles of L1 and L2 in L3 acquisition. Results of the reading aloud tasks, a questionnaire survey and interview data show that the language interaction patterns among L1, L2 and L3 are influenced by learners' language proficiency. Copyright ©2024 Routledge.

The expansion of English medium instruction (EMI) in higher education has generated significant scholarly interest, resulting in an increasing body of research across different contexts. This bibliometric study examines 1522 publications in the Scopus database to explore the intellectual, conceptual, and social structure of the EMI literature in higher education. Findings revealed substantial growth in publications and citations between 1974 and 2024, showing a notable increase in productivity after 2018. Most cited authors focus on EMI within their affiliated country, but some affiliated with British universities have made global contributions. The field exhibits global coverage, albeit with strong dominance by China, Spain, the UK, Australia, and Hong Kong, as well as limited representation from African nations, barring South Africa. EMI networks are primarily driven by authors’ current and past institutional affiliations as well as geographical proximity, with the UK, Spain, and China emerging as leaders in these networks. The most productive journals focus on multilingualism, bilingualism, language policy, teaching, and learning while also encompassing higher education and multidisciplinary areas. Key topics signal a shift towards translanguaging and classroom interaction. Under-researched areas include (post)colonialism and EMI implementation. These findings provide a comprehensive insight into the evolving landscape of EMI research and potential future directions. Copyright ©2024 MDPI.

In Hong Kong, Chinese and English are considered separate mediums of instruction. English immersion is expected for schools that teach with English as the medium of instruction, and direct instruction in Chinese is often used to teach English in Chinese medium schools. Evidently, a great divide persists in the Hong Kong government curriculum. In the English classroom, translanguaging is considered as detrimental to students' progress or reserved for the lower ability students. The significance of translanguaging on students' identity and meaning making is overlooked due to institutional English-only discourse. This article examines the possibility and potential impact of translanguaging in Hong Kong from the perspective of a student teacher who was an international school student and tuition centre instructor. Copyright ©2024 Routledge.

Despite the widespread use of mobile digital devices such as iPads in teaching and learning, there is little research on the ways in which content teachers make use of the technological affordances of the iPad to achieve pedagogical goals in bilingual/multilingual classrooms. This article adopts translanguaging as an analytical perspective to explore how the use of the iPad extends the semiotic and spatial repertoires for enabling the English Medium Instruction (EMI) teacher to create a translanguaging space for supporting multilingual students' learning of new academic knowledge. The data for this article is based on a linguistic ethnographic project in an EMI mathematics classroom in a secondary school in Hong Kong. Multimodal Conversation Analysis is used to analyse the classroom interactional data, triangulated with the video-stimulated-recall-interviews that are analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The article argues that the iPad provides opportunities for the EMI teacher to fully exploit the semiotic and spatial resources for creating a technology-mediated space in the classroom. Such a space in turn allows the teacher to accomplish content teaching and build a more engaging environment for learning. Copyright ©2024 SAGE Publications.

Purpose: Research on bi/multilingual oral interactions in English-medium instruction (EMI) is often concerned with how languages the teacher and/or students speak can be used for pedagogical scaffolding processes. In contrast, this paper aims to investigate how stylization of languages, including those that teacher and students only speak minimally, can likewise be harnessed for important pedagogical and interpersonal purposes. Methodology: I conduct an interactional sociolinguistic analysis of transcripts from an EMI teaching simulation in a Master’s in Education course at a university in Hong Kong. Data and analysis: As a cross-border teacher from Cantonese-speaking Guangdong and a local teacher of Indian heritage engaged in these language stylization processes, they show that teachers can effectively use bi/multilingual stylization in EMI with attention to student uptake and response. Findings/Conclusions: While pedagogical scaffolding is important in EMI, these processes can put more and less societally dominant languages in a diglossic, unequal relationship. In contrast, stylization can reconfigure classroom language norms and hierarchies, attach positive meanings to unratified codes, and allow teachers to share linguistic authority with students. Originality: Little research to date has studied stylization as a pedagogical resource in EMI, focusing instead on the use of languages teachers/students already know for scaffolding. Significance/Implications: Teacher professional development should address the topic of how to use language stylization in EMI, especially since these interactional strategies do not require teachers to dramatically reconfigure curriculum or instruction, yet have pedagogical and interpersonal benefits. Limitations: Future research should aim to study stylization in EMI in an authentic classroom setting. Copyright ©2024 Sage.

Prior research on classroom interaction has investigated how the teacher's feedback turn following students' responses can be used to transform students' turns into academic expressions during whole class discussions. Nevertheless, more empirical studies are needed to explore how teachers' translanguaging practices can play a role in shaping students' contributions into pedagogical opportunities for introducing academic terminologies in English-Medium-Instruction (EMI) classrooms. Adopting translanguaging as an analytical perspective, this study explores how an EMI history teacher deploys available linguistic and multimodal resources to connect students' responses with academic concepts and terminologies. The study draws its data from a larger linguistic ethnographic project that took place in an EMI secondary history classroom in Hong Kong. The classroom interaction data is examined using Multimodal Conversation Analysis, and this analysis is further triangulated with video-stimulated-recall-interviews that are analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. This paper argues that the EMI teacher's translanguaging practices facilitate the process of transforming student contributions into academic terminology and concepts. The process of deploying translanguaging for transforming student contributions highlights translanguaging as an important component of the teacher's classroom interactional competence for constructing new configurations of language practices and achieving specific pedagogical purposes. Copyright ©2024 Routledge.

Many studies of speech accommodation focus on native speakers with different dialects, whereas only a limited number of studies work on L2 speakers’ accommodation and discuss theories for second language (L2) accommodation. This paper aimed to fill the theoretical gap by integrating the revised speech learning model (SLM) with the exemplar-based models for L2 speech accommodation. A total of 19 Cantonese–English bilingual speakers completed map tasks with English speakers of Received Pronunciation and General American English in two separate experiments. Their pronunciations of THOUGHT and PATH vowels, and fricatives [z] and [θ] were examined before, during, and after the map tasks. The role of phonetic dissimilarity in L2 accommodation and L2 category formation in the revised SLM (SLM-r) were tested. First, the results suggested that global phonetic dissimilarity cannot predict Hong Kong English (HKE) speakers’ accommodation patterns. Instead, the segment-specific phonetic dissimilarity between participants and interlocutors was found to be positively correlated with the participants’ degree of accommodation. In addition, HKE speakers who did not form a new L2 category of [z] were found to significantly accommodate toward their interlocutor, suggesting that L2 accommodation might not be constrained by phonological category. An integrated exemplar model for L2 accommodation is proposed to explain these findings. Copyright ©2024 Sage.

This study investigated the impact of student-selected pairs on emotional engagement and language-learning opportunities generated during collaborative tasks. Sixteen learners of English at a Hong Kong secondary school performed collaborative tasks in two pairing arrangements: student-selected pairing and teacher-assigned pairing (mixed proficiency). Data sources include transcripts of task interactions, a self-selection questionnaire that assessed learners' criteria for selecting a partner, and a post-task emotional engagement questionnaire. The results revealed that learners' choice of partner was primarily based on friendship, and that, compared to the teacher-assigned pairing arrangement, self-selection led to elevated levels of enjoyment. However, neither arrangement had an overall advantage in terms of generating language-related discussions. A qualitative analysis of task interactions revealed that student-selected pairs more frequently used the L1 to elaborate and resolve English language issues, but the friendship nature of these collaborations also led to more frequent off-task discussions, limiting their language learning opportunities. Copyright ©2024 Oxford University Press.