This qualitative study has investigated how a group of bilingual university students in Hong Kong understand digital citizenship and construct it through digital literacy practices in social media. Drawing on interview data and examples of digital activity shared by the students, we adopt the theories of digital literacies and translanguaging and transsemiotizing to reveal how they construct digital citizenship through an complex interplay between several factors, most prominently (1) a variety of digitally mediated social, cultural and educational practices the students engage in, (2) their agency of deploying diverse linguistic and semiotic recourses to achieve varied communicative effects in different settings and (3) their personal pursuits of intellectual and professional development and social engagement in a digitalized and globalized society. We then discuss how the findings can enrich our understanding of digital citizenship and its relationship with digital literacies in a multilingual and multicultural context such as Hong Kong. The implications for digital citizenship education are also discussed. Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc.

This article analyses the study-abroad identity of Central Asian undergraduate students in a Hong Kong university. It draws on the narrative data to explore the intercultural tensions and challenges they faced in the higher education context, as well as the impact of their study-abroad experiences on their identity-making when integrating into the receiving society. Drawing on Herzfeld’s (2005) concept of cultural intimacy, this article explains the students’ limited participation in local Hong Kong communities and their strong connection to the small, diasporic Central Asian network. It also reveals the co-existence of post-Soviet national identities and a cohesive Central Asian identity in the participants’ identity-making processes. Copyright © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Despite the mounting evidence supporting the effectiveness of short-term study abroad programs (such as Service-Learning programs) on university students’ development, few studies have been conducted to explore the impact of short-term study in China programs on young people from Hong Kong. This study employed a qualitative design method to examine the impact of three types of short-term study programs in China—summer school, cultural tour, and service-learning—on Hong Kong university students’ development and to explore both the facilitators of, and the barriers to, the impact of the programs. A total of 42 students from 17 short-term study in China programs were interviewed individually. Results showed that all three types of short-term study in China programs were perceived by participants as having a positive impact on their intercultural competence as well as their perceptions of, and attitudes toward, the Nation and Chinese people. Participants of service-learning programs also demonstrated enhanced global citizenship. However, these programs did not have any significant impact on their perceived identities as Hong Kong or Chinese citizens. Individual and program factors that facilitated or impeded the student’s gains from the programs were identified. These findings provide pioneer evidence for the positive impacts of short-term study in China programs on Hong Kong local university students and for the improvement of the current programs as well as the development of new programs in the future. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s).

The past decades have witnessed an increasing number of studies documenting native English teachers’ (NETs’) challenges in professional development and collaboration with nonnative English teachers’ (NNETs’) across multiple educational contexts. There are also debates in TESOL regarding the essentialized dichotomy of NETs and NNETs with insufficient recognition of the educational and cultural experiences of teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) / English as a second language (ESL). Little research has been conducted on the lived experiences of transnational multilingual NETs who work in heritage contexts; and how they position themselves when they conduct their teacher identity work and negotiate between heritage identity and NET identity. This study, drawing on the notion of ethical self-formation and its application in teacher identity research as a theoretical lens, addresses the gap by investigating the identity construction of two transnational NETs of Chinese ethnicity returning to their home context in Hong Kong to teach. The findings indicate that (1) the participants negotiated their multilingual identity and the monolingual NET identity ascribed in the workplace, (2) they developed counter-strategies to turn the knowledge of the local language and culture into resources in teaching, and (3) they agentively expanded the definition of NET and situated them in the full institutional and social context to consider their identity conflict and self-empowerment. The findings have implications for education policy to accommodate and value the plural-competences of NETs and NNETs. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s).

Although the potential of translanguaging within ESL/EFL classroom contexts to promote students' linguistic learning has been well-documented, most studies have focused on ESL/EFL teachers (whose L1 is not English) and their students' ideologies and experiences, with little attention paid to the experiences and perspectives of native English teachers (NETs) working in the Global South and postcolonial areas. This study examined 11 native English teachers' engagement with translanguaging in Hong Kong TESOL classrooms. Data were gathered through in-depth semi-structured individual interviews and video recordings of classroom interactions. A recursive qualitative analysis elicited a taxonomy of NET teachers' engagement with translanguaging, comprising resistant, ambivalent, and reductionistic approaches. The findings also demonstrate that ambivalent engagement with translanguaging turned out to be adopted the most among the NET participants. The findings call for examining two new translanguaging forms through NET teachers who have worked under a linguistically policed discourse, i.e., the underground and disguised translanguaging, and multimodal translanguaging without involving students' L1. The findings indicate that multimodality can be used as a bridge to create a translanguaging space, and that creating a translanguaging space through multimodality appears to be more politically neutral for NET teachers. Copyright © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.

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.

This qualitative study investigated the impact of online education on the learning and peer interaction experiences of students from eight universities in Hong Kong over the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. It employed an expansive and spatial notion of translanguaging to explore the process by which students drew on the affordance of virtual communication environments to communicate, study and develop new identities. The findings suggested (1) the students strategically mobilised manifold multimodal resources to constitute their communicative repertoires that facilitated smooth intercultural communication and academic success; (2) such communicative competence centralized the mediating effect of digital semiotic systems and thus might empower the students with disadvantaged language skills; and (3) through translanguaging acts the students developed a virtually translocal identity with an expanded experience of internationalisation of higher education whereby the increasingly interwoven physical and virtual spaces bring extended social networks, learning resources, and career opportunities. The implications of the findings were discussed. Copyright © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

This article reports on a qualitative study investigating the teaching experiences of ESL teachers of ethnic minority students from South Asian countries. Eight ESL teachers from two secondary schools in Hong Kong were interviewed. Informed by the concept of neoliberal governmentality, this study explores the shaping effect of neoliberal education on these teachers’ professional development, their negotiation with the current examination-oriented educational policy, and the overall neoliberal discourse in education. The teachers were found to be ambivalent in their contradictory positions regarding whether to encourage or prohibit the use of heritage languages in English learning, whether to conform to the curriculum or develop new materials and try out new ways, and how to unravel social responsibility for ethnic minority groups’ development. This study has implications for the importance of awareness of the impact of macro-level neoliberalism on micro-level educational practices among teachers, principals, and policy makers, and for the necessity of developing teacher education programmes to prepare teachers with a particular concern about the well-being of children (especially those in underprivileged communities), and enable them to think critically about scripted curriculum packages and to work within more diverse and challenging contexts. Copyright © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

While there is growing recognition of the mutually shaping relationship between teaching with information technology (IT) and teachers' beliefs, skills and self‐efficacy, there has been a paucity of research attention on the construction of teacher identity during actual IT‐assisted in‐class teaching and out‐of‐class networking with students, in a full institutional and social context. This study investigates how a group of secondary school English as a second language (ESL) teachers regulated their teaching and practices and constructed their identities in relation to governmental requirements for the use of IT in teaching. Teachers from seven government‐subsidised schools in Hong Kong were interviewed about their experiences of using IT in teaching. We frame the reported practices of these teachers as a process of construction of identity, formed in the context of the 'governmentality' supporting current examination‐oriented educational policy. Observing from the perspective of what has been termed 'governmentality' and an ethical framework for self‐formation of personal identity makes it possible to see these teachers' professional identities constructed through the use of IT practices within the contradictory conditions of professional/personal demands, compliance/resistance, school promotion/peer non‐cooperation, advantage/disadvantage in use of IT, use of IT/content and pedagogical knowledge. This study has implications for developing a more supportive and rational environment for the use of IT in teaching, in which more autonomy and identity options—rather than constraints—can be provided for teachers in the digital era. This study also informs practitioners and policy makers in other educational settings experiencing a similar IT boom in teaching. Copyright © 2019 British Educational Research Association.