With an increasing number of students of ethnic minority in the Education University of Hong Kong, a new Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for learning spoken Cantonese was designed in 2020 and was completed in 2022. The platform aimed at providing additional support to Non-Chinese Speaking (NCS) students. The researchers were the principal project leaders. An exploratory study was conducted to examine the challenges encountered and the solutions implemented. It was comprised of three parts: a self-reflective study, a questionnaire survey and an in-depth individual interview. It was found that there were five main challenges: learners’ difficulty in learning Cantonese as a tonal language (Chan & Li, 2000), a diversity of their ethnicities, a wide gap of learning differences, a low level of motivation, and finally a limited budget and labour for the creation of the MOOC (Barak et al., 2016). To address those issues, a bundle of solutions was implemented. Topics and learning objects were plotted on a scale of difficulty. After students had practiced pronunciation of items ranging from mono-syllabic words to poly-syllabic words or phrases, they had to practise multi-levelled tasks in different real-life situational contexts. Motivation was enhanced by the use of visuals, audios, learning videos and a scoring mechanism incorporated in the platform. During the production of the learning videos, students also played the roles of characters and hence provided them with more guided and authentic learning experiences. It was concluded that those methods were mostly effective in addressing the challenges. Copyright © 2023 ACCS.

Objectives: Research shows that compassion from others and from the self may enable university students to face, overcome, and bounce back from adversity and generate a greater sense of thriving and meaning in life. However, the underlying processes are largely unknown. The present study aimed to examine the associations of compassion with psychological distress, flourishing, and meaning in life among university students and explore the mechanisms underlying these associations. Methods: A total of 536 Hong Kong university students completed questionnaires measuring their experiences of compassion from others, self-compassion, resilience, psychological distress, flourishing, and meaning in life. Results: Serial mediation analyses showed that compassion from others was associated positively with self-compassion, which was, in turn, linked to greater resilience and consequently lower levels of psychological distress and higher levels of flourishing and meaning in life. Conclusions: Our findings reveal the associations of compassion from others and self-compassion with the well-being and life meaning of university students. The findings highlight the importance of being open and receptive to love and kindness from others. The findings also point to the importance of developing a caring attitude toward oneself. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s).

This study analyses the results of an investigation of wrongly written Chinese characters of Hong Kong university students. In recent years, many local university students display poor Chinese language proficiency while writing. A study was conducted in a Chinese writing course for year one undergraduate students of The Education University of Hong Kong. The data about wrongly written characters were collected from the students’ assignments and test scripts. To explore the reasons behind university students writing the wrong Chinese character frequently, the “errors analysis” by James (1998) was employed to determine the reasons and impact of making such mistakes. The result shows that many students wrote wrong Chinese characters, because they are mainly affected by the characters’ structures, pronunciations and meanings. Moreover, some students insisted that they are just careless or lack concentration in general. Besides the common reasons above, some students suggest a new reason for writing wrong Chinese characters: in past decades, Japanese culture has come to have an influence on many young people around the world. In Hong Kong, many youngsters are influenced by Japanese culture deeply, so in the end they will sometimes mix up and misuse the Chinese characters (especially the simplified Chinese characters which are used in mainland China) and Japanese characters. Thus, they will wrongly use the Japanese characters in their Chinese writing (especially handwriting). At the end of the study, it suggests some solutions to enhance students’ Chinese language proficiency in this aspect and prevent them from writing incorrect characters again.