This article explores how Hong Kong Chinese engineering students with low English language proficiency manage to cope with their lectures given in English. An ethnographic case study approach was used with multiple sources of data triangulated to provide a picture of the lecture event from both the students' and the lecturer's perspectives. One of the outcomes of the study, as described in this article, is that lectures have specific genres and that these genres need to be seen as more than linguistic events. By way of a case study into lecturer behaviour/intention and students' perceptions, lectures can be viewed within the wider, socially constructed context.
[Copyright of Studies in Higher Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075070701685163]

Many schools in Hong Kong are concerned with the growing number of enrolments of students from Mainland China. This article examines the immigrant students' constructs of their cross-cultural identities. It reveals how these students experience a journey of transformation in language, culture and identity. Qualitative data were collected from unstructured interviews with 12 immigrant students from Mainland China from six secondary schools. Two cases which are representative of the sample are reported. The study showed the transformation of the cross-cultural identities of these students, in the process of which they adopted the new culture into their lives and made it their reality while they still strongly connected part of their identity to their Mainland Chinese background. Despite some negative experiences of adaptation, they adopted a meritocratic approach to making sense of their cross-cultural experience. It was used as a form of agency to overcome, or at least ameliorate, feelings of discrimination, loss of cultural support and being immigrants in the 'new' society of Hong Kong. Lastly, two implications for the promotion of education for immigrant students will be discussed at school and legal levels.
[Copyright of Ethnography and Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17457820802305469]