This paper studies the identity dilemmas of a teacher negotiating the tensions underpinning the transformations in the language profile of a Hong Kong primary school. Using a rigorous triangulation of written journals and in-depth interviews, the study reconstructs a case narrative personified as “Lily”, an English language teacher at “Lexis Elementary”, a school that previously struggled with low student enrolments. As a solution, the school now enrols students from Mainland China, where the spoken language is Mandarin rather than Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong. Resulting tensions arose because of transformations in the school’s language profile. Lily constructs the language terrain she negotiates in her interactions with cross-border Mainland Chinese and local Hong Kong parents and students, and her responses to interactions among students. This paper provides original conceptual tools to explain complex “born-again” sentiments that trigger people to act in reverse against the stipulated conditions of the powerful. The concept of “born-again reversals” connects to global literature on resistance against “language learning for economic benefits”. Insights from this study reconcile theoretical debates on using economic power as soft power, providing teachers with the conceptual tools to understand the identity dilemmas they experience with language planning initiatives worldwide. Copyright © 2023 National Institute of Education, Singapore.

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) is characterized by using students’ additional language (L2) as the medium of instruction of non-language content subjects. In recent decades, this type of program has been gaining worldwide popularity, especially in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) contexts, because of the assumption that it can facilitate L2 learning. However, this assumption may not be realized in many classrooms in EFL contexts, where both teachers and students are often not well-prepared to cope with the heavy linguistic demands to learn content and language simultaneously. Owing to a combination of sociopolitical and socioeconomic forces, Hong Kong has a rather long history of practicing some form of CLIL in secondary schools, in the form of English-medium instruction (EMI) education. Following some recent changes in the government’s medium of instruction policies, there are different models and practices of EMI in Hong Kong schools to accommodate students with different English proficiency levels and also the expectations of different stakeholders. This chapter will illustrate these different models and practices and discuss their implications and challenges for English language learning, content learning, and teacher education. Copyright © 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Critical thinking is believed to be an essential skill for 21st century survival and therefore has been widely promoted in education. In Hong Kong, critical thinking is one of nine generic skills to be developed across all subjects, including English. How students do critical thinking in ESL, which is seldom used outside school and yet holds high social value, has, however, been underresearched. This article is concerned with how some low-English-proficiency senior secondary students in Hong Kong conducted critical talk in English. The study specifically investigates how the students used English to express ideas that were first developed in Cantonese (the students' first language). Based on a discourse analysis of the criticality and elaborateness of the Cantonese and English utterances of one group of students, the authors discuss findings that reveal a significant contrast between the students' more elaborated discourse in Cantonese and a restricted discourse in English characterised by reduced content and limited lexicogrammatical structures. The findings call for more attention to the impacts of linguistic proficiencies on critical thinking performance of ESL learners and to how the communicative gaps in critical literate talk revealed in ESL learners' first and second languages can be gradually reduced.

In this article, the role of translanguaging in facilitating content and language integrated learning (CLIL) is examined in connection with the notion of academic language across the curriculum in multilingual contexts. Ethnographic naturalistic observations and interviews were conducted to analyse translanguaging in the dynamic flow of interactions among South Asian ethnic minoritized students and their science teacher in a CLIL classroom in Hong Kong. The analysis shows that despite dominant school and government policies that impose a monolingual medium of instruction, translanguaging naturally flows from the dynamic interactions and activities in the classroom as both teacher and students are intensely engaged in meaning making about the lesson topics. Drawing on a recent theoretical explication of translanguaging and flows, the notion of translanguaging is further explicated with new theoretical and empirical import from the distributed language view. Pedagogical implications for CLIL are discussed.

In this paper, I analyze the recent official, academic, and media discourses in Hong Kong to examine how the 'language problem' has been formulated and represented, and to expose and problematize the models of language, learning, and education that are being imposed by these public discourses. I seek to examine the role these discourses play in producing and perpetuating false consciousness or popular taken-for-granted notions about language and language learning among Hong Kong people. I conclude with a proposal of alternative models to the dominant ones.

In recent years, the practice of using a second/foreign language to teach non-language content subjects (e.g. science) has become increasingly popular, especially in English-as-foreign-language (EFL) contexts. Such a practice can be categorised as 'Content and Language Integrated Learning' (CLIL). However, EFL learners may encounter difficulties in accessing content knowledge through English, especially with regard to the subject-specific academic literacy. Hence, content subject teachers may need to provide more scaffolding to help EFL learners in CLIL bridge the gap between everyday language and academic literacy. A genre-based approach, which emphasises contextualised language learning and use, serves as a useful framework to integrate content and language teaching in CLIL. This chapter shares an example of how university language specialists collaborated with science teachers in one secondary school in Hong Kong, where CLIL is practised. Drawing insights from the genre-based approach, the university-school collaborative team designed and tried out a set of materials to help grade 8 students write a piece of sequential explanation text. Lesson observations revealed how teachers integrated language scaffolding into their science lessons, and students' sample work and teachers' reflection showed that the materials were useful for helping the students develop science literacy. These findings yield significant implications for literacy development in science education and language across the curriculum in CLIL.

In this paper the notion of critical practice in English language education (ELE) is explored through examples from the critical work of educators and researchers in Hong Kong. The paper then concludes with a discussion of both the challenges and possibilities of engaging in critical practice in ELE in Hong Kong and possibly in other East Asian contexts, where similar cultures of teaching and learning predominate.