This qualitative study investigates the interplay between the ethnic and academic identity construction of a group of university students with South Asian backgrounds in Hong Kong. The findings indicate that ethnic identity and ethnic socialization have protective and facilitative effects on learning motivation and academic achievement. It is found that these ethnic minority students receiving tertiary education, holding congruent views of ethnic and academic identity, display a sense of agency and critical reflectivity of both the host society and their heritage communities and see facilitating community uplift and developing a more positive social image of ethnic minorities as their generation’s responsibility. Reconstructing an ethnic identity and developing new social images therefore motivate them to pursue academic success. The findings indicate that the South Asian students figured out ways in which to interact with the outer world and set up new roles and spaces (i.e., a heritage community with more positive social image). The findings shed light on how to provide better opportunities for and assistance to ethnic minority students when they pursue higher education. Copyright © 2019 Springer Nature B.V.

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.

This article investigates the experiences in knowledge development and sharing of a group of migrant teachers from different Asian countries who are teaching in secondary schools in Hong Kong. Seeing dispositions as the key to professionalization and professional contributions, it explores the possibilities and challenges in harnessing the professional value of their transnational disposition. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to investigate the participants’ position in the workplace, negotiations of the local curriculum and classroom practice, and professional interactions with colleagues and parents. The findings show that these teachers actively respond to invisibility and marginalization by drawing from their transcultural disposition to creatively but cautiously transform pedagogical practices and discourses. It is found that the presence of migrant professionals in local context provides opportunities for critical reflexivity and transnational awareness among local professionals. It is implied that the changes in thinking and awareness may lead to broad-based ideological and structural changes, which in turn promotes productive knowledge exchange. Copyright © 2017 Oxford University Press.

This qualitative study investigates the language ideology of a groups of Chinese language teachers working in Hong Kong’s secondary schools when they teach ethnic minority students. Drawing on interview data, this study reports on how these teachers’ language ideologies are in accordance/discordance with dominant discourse, and in what ways their ideologies impact their teaching approach and attitudes towards the students’ heritage language and culture. Key findings indicate that instead of promoting homogeneity as a prerequisite for success, the teachers hold a pluralistic language ideology and outline the potential for ethnic minority students to become linguistic and cultural brokers between the heritage communities and mainstream society. An inconsistence was found between the teachers’ positive language attitude towards heritage language and their self-distancing from the heritage language learning and use in school contexts. The findings implied that teacher education courses could enable teachers, as active agents, to re-negotiate the separate language ideology of the language policy at the macro level, deconstruct it in classroom settings and develop knowledge and beliefs to challenge and resist the ideologies that sustain the marginalisation of heritage language and culture. Copyright © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.