The use of educational apps in teaching the humanities in higher education is increasingly widespread and commonplace. Understanding the efficacy of using such apps, however, presents a challenge due to the proliferation of countless different apps, each with unique and overlapping functions, often used in courses with very different content and objectives. The PICRAT model provides a framework to compare the educational efficacy of integrating various education apps, even when used in a variety of different courses. This paper presents the results of a project conducted at the Faculty of Humanities at a Hong Kong university. The objective was to develop examples of effective technology-enhanced teaching in the humanities that could be shared as models with other instructors teaching in the humanities. The PICRAT framework focuses on the students’ and teachers’ roles in using technology. All the project courses aimed to change the students’ role from one of more passive to more active and ultimately more creative engagement; and to advance the teachers’ use of technology from merely replacing traditional pedagogy to providing a more amplified and, whenever possible, transformative approach to its use. Examples from three of the twelve project case studies will be described; teacher and student perspectives of the efficacy of using the apps will be analyzed; and the PICRAT model will be used to analyze the overall conclusions that can be drawn from the range of diverse exemplars developed in the project. Copyright © 2023 ICLT.

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.

Interdisciplinary collaboration is one important development direction in Chinese teaching and teaching Chinese as a foreign language. Against the background, in 2018-19, the Department of Chinese Language Studies of the Education University of Hong Kong, together with the Department of Science and Environmental Studies, Department of Psychology, designed a course -- named "STEM and its Application on Language Acquisition and Communication" --for learning Chinese Language through STEM elements combined with psychological theories. The author is one of the three designers of this course. The students who take this course are mostly prospective teachers of Teaching Chinese as a foreign language and Chinese Language. This interdisciplinary course offers participants the opportunities to understand and experience the major approaches in STEM, namely scientific inquiry and engineering design cycle, in solving cross-disciplinary problems in language acquisition and communication. Through the course, participants first identify a problem related to language acquisition and communication, then develop a solution by applying scientific inquiry and engineering design cycle, and finally reflect on the impacts, feasibility, cultural and socio-economic implications of the problem and the proposed solution using an interdisciplinary approach. Participants are required to disseminate their ideas, findings or products to experts in different areas, and are thus encouraged to integrate discipline-based knowledge in problem identification, solution development, dissemination and reflection, facilitating analyses from multi-disciplinary perspectives. Based on the theory of interdisciplinary language learning, this report aims to analyze the learning and teaching achievements of students and teachers in this course, as well as the problems encountered, and discuss the future development of the course. Copyright © 2023 The Eighth International Conference on Teaching Chinese as a Second Language

The issue of Artificial Intelligence (AI) literacy is gaining popularity in the field of education. Most research on AI literacy has focused on primary, secondary, and higher education, and there has been limited examination of AI literacy programs in early childhood education. This study aimed to evaluate the impact of an eight-week AI literacy program on young children’s AI literacy, AI-related creativity, and their perceptions of the AI4KG program. A total of 26 young children (average age of 4 years) enrolled in the program at a kindergarten in Hong Kong were the subjects of the study. The results indicated that (1) young children were capable of learning basic AI concepts and knowledge; (2) in terms of AI-related creativity, younger children were able to design a chatting robot via imagination, while older children created an AI robot to assist people in their drawings; (3) in regards to the children's perceptions of the AI4KG program, older children who enjoyed the activity were able to train AI, while younger children preferred to draw the future AI city and participate in the AI story activity. This study highlights the positive benefits of AI literacy education in preparing young children for an AI-driven future. Copyright © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

All public-funded Hong Kong universities have explicit practices to promote integrity and prevent students’ academic dishonesty. Using the Behaviour Change Wheel as a conceptual framework, three common practices were analysed in the present study, namely, enforcement of policies to penalize dishonest acts, use of plagiarism detection software, and mandatory attendance at academic honesty workshops. Qualitative data were collected from 50 students (in 14 focus groups) and individual interviews with 18 faculty members from eight publicly-funded universities in Hong Kong. Content analyses reveal that, although the students and faculty staff endorsed punishment as an effective intervention to reduce motivation to cheat, they also believed it would not enhance motivation for honest behaviours. Plagiarism detection software might reduce opportunities to plagiarize, but students with dishonest motivations will only turn to harder-to-trace means to cheat. While demonstrating good concepts of academic honesty, a sign that academic honesty education was working, the students attributed dishonest motivation to insufficient capability to perform academic tasks, which they described as a common problem. Both students and staff opined that the solution lies in more responsive learning support and pedagogical enhancement, but that it is constrained by university policies. Copyright © 2022 National Institute of Education, Singapore.

Despite the rapid growth of English Medium Instruction (EMI) programmes around the globe, the language goals in such programmes have not been clearly defined, making it difficult to evaluate their success. Accordingly, our paper reports on a study that attempted to identify the language goals, operationalised as the vocabulary expected of learners, by investigating the under-explored area of EMI assessment. We sampled a corpus of 16 sets of examination papers in two subject areas, namely, Biology and Geography, spanning eight years in Hong Kong. The examination papers, analysed for their vocabulary profiles, indicated that students were expected to learn beyond the K3 level (the most frequent 3,000 words in English) and master mid-frequency words (K4−K8) as well as academic words. Our findings suggest that the less frequent words were not often shared by the two subjects. Analysing academic words also enabled us to showcase how some words were common across the two subjects while others were more subject-specific. Pedagogical implications are discussed, highlighting the need for teachers and students to attend to target language goals in EMI, and to consider the subject-specific nature of vocabulary items in EMI. Copyright © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

This paper aims to provide comparative insights into the psychosocial well-being of Hong Kong and Kazakhstan undergraduate students, focusing specifically on the role of ethnicity and gender. The existing body of literature on students’ health-promoting lifestyle has shown how age, gender, income level, sociability, and knowledge of health can shape one’s perception of physical and mental well-being. Much lesser attention, however, has been paid to the ways in which students from diverse ethnic origins differ from each other in cultivating different dimensions of psychosocial well-being. To address this issue, this study delivered questionnaires to 284 undergraduate students from Hong Kong and 281 undergraduate students from Kazakhstan. Developed from the Health-Promoting Lifestyle Profile II, the questionnaire is designed to measure undergraduate’s psychosocial well-being threefold. Using independent sample t-test, this paper shows that Hong Kong undergraduate students have higher levels of psychosocial well-being in terms of “interpersonal relations” and “stress management” whereas Kazakhstan undergraduate students are stronger in another dimension of well-being – “spiritual growth”. Results show that the influence of gender on students’ psychosocial well-being varies in different contexts. One of the important implications of these findings suggests that school administrators and students from different countries may benefit from cross-cultural exchange, co-promoting all dimensions of psychosocial well-being. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s).