The language-related challenges affecting international university students' adaptation to a new host environment have been extensively explored in English-speaking countries. However, few studies have been performed in non English-speaking countries or regions, and even fewer have investigated these challenges from the perspective of learner autonomy. Adopting a process-oriented approach, the present qualitative, multiple case study examines how nine first-year mainland Chinese university students developed their autonomy in adapting to English-medium-instruction (EMI) in a university in Hong Kong, a multilingual context. The findings reveal that, via a three-stage process, the participants developed autonomy by changing their strategies for both learning and using English during their first year of study. The participants' development of autonomy for learning and using English was also mediated by the local multilingual context. These findings help to deepen our understanding of the dynamics and complexity of students' long-term autonomy development in an era of increasing internationalization in higher education.
[Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd.]

This paper presents a personal picture of my long-standing association with the English language teaching and assessment situation in Hong Kong. The paper presents a 50-year retrospective of assessment in Hong Kong, through the lens of my own 35-year stint in the territory and my personal experience of English language teaching, teacher education, and assessment. I present a historical and theoretical picture of how English language examinations have moved forward in Hong Kong, and how I was fortunate enough to be involved in the big changes which were taking place in English language assessment in particular. While the picture I portray through this paper is a rather personal one, it contributes to an understanding of how assessment reform has been forward-looking, and largely successful, in Hong Kong, painting a picture of how assessment development has complemented curriculum development. I suggest that it may be instructive for educators in other jurisdictions to consider the long-term picture of development in English language assessment reform in their own country with a view to analyzing their own perspectives concerning the relative success of policy changes and large-scale reforms.
[Copyright © 2015 Brunei Darussalam : Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Institute of Education, Universiti Brunei Darussalam.]

This article reports the results of a qualitative study investigating the experiences of five former English language teachers in Hong Kong during their initial years of full-time teaching and the reasons for their permanent departure from the profession. Guided by a theory of teacher identity construction, the study employed a discourse analytic approach to understand the participants’ perceptions of their professional identity construction in discourse and practice. The results of in-depth interviews provide detailed descriptions of the ways in which the former teachers perceived the constraints and enablements to their professional identity construction within the context of their ultimate decision to leave the teaching profession. The findings problematise rigid divisions between different types of teachers and suggest the need to establish new spaces for identity construction that allow for the meshing of different teacher identities.
[Copyright © 2016 Taylor & Francis.]

English is an important foreign language for children in Asia. In certain economies specializing in international trade (e.g., Hong Kong), parents have high expectations on their preschoolers’ English proficiency. Since instruction time for English in preschools is often limited in these societies (20 to 25 minutes per day, 3 to 5 times a day), school principals sometimes have difficulty deciding how the best teachers of English should utilize the time in their English lessons in order to maximize children’s language development. In this study, I compared three types of preschool English lessons: story-telling, arts and craft, and phonics lessons in order to understand the teacher’s use of the language. In particular, I am interested in the number of times teachers repeat vocabularies and the complexity of the sentences used (as indexed by the type-token ratio and mean length of utterance respectively). The idea is that the type of lessons which affords the richest use of language (i.e., where words are repeated and used in lengthier sentences) is likely to stimulate children’s oral language development, which serves as the foundation for children’s future literacy development. An analysis of six 25-minute English lessons revealed that teachers were less likely to repeat words and more likely to use shorter sentences in phonics lessons in comparison to other lesson types. The implication is that for preschools in which English exposure time is limited, a predominance of phonics lessons (e.g., two out of three lessons in a week) might be detrimental to young children’s oral language development.