Language learners and teachers’ cognition in respect of learning and teaching plays a critical role in mediating their actual behaviour and decisions in the process. This study investigates the vocabulary learning and teaching beliefs held by pre-service and in-service teachers in Hong Kong and on the Chinese mainland so that teacher education programmes can better equip teachers with appropriate knowledge concerning the vital task of vocabulary teaching. A mixed approach was adopted in inquiring into the nature of vocabulary learning and teaching beliefs held by these participants. Statistical tests (factor analysis, multi-variate analysis, and Chi-square test) were employed in conjunction with qualitative analysis of the data collected. The analyses revealed variations in the beliefs held by the participants in the two contexts. The identified variations in the beliefs held by pre-service and in-service participants both in Hong Kong and on the Chinese mainland were less significant than those that emerged when comparing Hong Kong participants’ beliefs with those of their mainland Chinese counterparts. The findings are indicative of profound contextual mediation on the participants’ vocabulary teaching and learning beliefs. They also confirm the importance of raising and strengthening language teachers’ strategy and language awareness in teacher development programmes.
[Copyright of Roeper Review is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658416.2011.579977]

Commencing study through a foreign language in senior secondary school brings huge challenges because of the cognitive-linguistic demands of academic subjects. This paper argues for the need to blend sociocultural and systemic functional linguistic (SFL) perspectives to address this enormous task. Firstly, readers' attention is drawn to the less than successful history, globally, of helping students overcome the challenges. Secondly, the paper sets out the author's intention to respond to the call by Coyle for bilingual educators working in a predominantly sociocultural paradigm to 'connect' with other paradigms. Next, aiming to respond to two exploratory questions regarding the power of SFL to inform planning of language-aware teaching, which is richer and more productive than is evident in sociocultural scholarship, the paper proceeds towards descriptive and comparative analyses of a student's written outcome in science, using the SFL framework based on 'text architecture'. The SFL analyses exemplify what might be taught, with brief mention of how SFL practitioners do so, in order to raise awareness of academic genre creation. Finally, drawing on the paper's analyses and evidence from elsewhere, arguments for the paradigmatic blending are synthesised.
[Copyright of Language Awareness is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658410903431721]

Two hundred and ninety-six English majors at universities in Poland, Austria and Hong Kong were given a 50-item questionnaire designed to evaluate their knowledge of grammatical terminology. The main aim was to identify whether the three populations were subject to differing 'terminological cultures'. This was found to be substantially the case; for example, the term indefinite article was known by 95% of Polish students but only 29% of the Hong Kong ones, whereas imperative was known by 71% of the Austrians but only 5% of the Hong Kongers. Some differences were attributed to a lack of use of the related concept in teaching; others were explained by the use of a synonymous term (e.g. reported speech was preferred in Poland and Hong Kong but indirect speech in Austria). A significant correlation between terminological knowledge and language proficiency was found for the Hong Kong students. Qualitative findings included confusion between pairs of complementary terms and thosewith similar forms; unknown terms being treated as transparent with functional reference where possible; and the prototypical use ofwords as examples of grammatical categories (e.g. 'beautiful' for adjective). Implications for teachers, writers and researchers are discussed.
[Copyright of Language Awareness is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658410802513751]