High-quality teacher-child interactions benefit children’s learning and developmental trajectories. However, professional development (PD) opportunities for early childhood teachers on how to interact with children are typically insufficient. To enhance teacher-child interactional quality in Hong Kong kindergartens, we designed an online PD entitled Chat with Children, composed of 10 units of learning resources and activities. The objective of this study was to explore how this online PD influenced teachers’ beliefs and intentions regarding teacher-child interaction. Participants were 217 in-service Hong Kong kindergarten teachers. Pre-post evaluation was conducted to examine teachers’ beliefs and intentions in the dimensions of Organization of the Teaching Experience, Group Sensitivity, Encouragement of Communication, and Behavioral Support. After taking the course, teachers had stronger beliefs and intentions to organize interactive activities, address children’s needs with sensitivity, and engage children in communications. Furthermore, teachers believed that they should give children more freedom to settle conflicts, rather directing their misbehaviours immediately. This study provides evidence on the potential of online PD to enhance teachers’ beliefs and intentions regarding how to engage children. Implications, limitations, and future research are discussed. Copyright © 2025 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

Purpose This article takes a postfoundational lens to reflect upon my ethnographic (re)searching experience in a Hong Kong high school biology classroom to expose ignorant theoretical-methodological assumptions of researchers and teachers on critical thinking for new realizations.Design/Approach/Methods Using an encountered embodied thinking moment as a trigger, this article examines the texts/discourses collected from teachers/teaching and students/learning to unpack underlying philosophical-theoretical-methodological traps and ignorance.Findings The analysis exposes three ignorant assumptions. First is a mind-body dualism that has historically disembodied thinking as an abstract and invisible mind/cognitive activity. Second is a knowledge-skill/thinking divide that upgrades critical thinking as a transferrable higher-order skill above and external to knowledge. Third is a naturalized assumption that didactic instructions in Asian classrooms are not as conducive to thinking cultivation as (Western) student-centered pedagogies.Originality/Value My postfoundational reflections interrogate and expand these philosophical-theoretical-methodological grounds to reconstruct effective thinking curricula and classrooms. Copyright © 2024 SAGE Publications Ltd.

Emotions have received widespread attention in the education field globally thanks to the greater emphasis on well-being in recent times. Against this backdrop and the fact that foreign language (FL) education is increasingly common from a young age, this study set out to investigate what FL classroom activities children find most enjoyable and most boring, and why. Ninety-eight Grade-5 English-as-a-FL learners in Hong Kong participated in this study. The participants put forward 18 activities that they thought were most enjoyable, especially games and videos (together making up about 49% of the responses) . Fifteen activities were deemed most boring, especially writing and dictation (together 45% of the responses). Fun , knowledge-gaining , and opportunities for interaction were among the most common reasons given for activities being enjoyable, while difficult , troublesome , and tiring were the main descriptors of the activities they thought were boring. Copyright ©2024 Springer.

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools have become a popular topic in the education field. Most of the schools in Hong Kong focus on how to properly use AI software to help students' learning experience. As this is still a relatively new technology, the stance for most of the schools in Hong Kong is skeptical. This study aims to find out whether AI-generative tools, such as ChatGPT, can help to improve students' English writing skills in university. Interviews were used to find out students and teachers' opinions towards using AI in writing. The results indicate that students find AI tools convenient for learning writing skills, but teachers are concerned that the feedback and examples provided by AI are too general and ambiguous. This study provides some interesting opinions from students and teachers about their experience using AI in learning and writing and helps us to understand more about how to use AI effectively in the education sector. Copyright ©2024 Online Learning Consortium.

This paper contributes to our conceptualization of linguistic identities in English as a lingua franca (ELF) communication by analyzing a group of multilingual international students' narrativized accounts of their ELF communication experiences in an international university in Hong Kong. The findings of the study indicate that despite their status as L2 speakers, the participants considered themselves as legitimate speakers of English when interacting with others through ELF. Moreover, they oriented to their national cultural identities and personal identities indexed through their accents in ELF communication. Their frequent use of ELF with other students from diverse linguacultural backgrounds also prompted them to identify positively with a local ELF-using community and envision their imagined identities as members of a global ELF-using community. The findings further reveal that the participants' ELF communication experiences opened up a space for them to take on new and alternative L2-speaking personal identities which they perceived to be markedly different from and more desirable than their L1-based selves. Overall, the analysis provides empirical support for applying a tripartite model of linguistic identity for understanding ELF communication experiences and calls attention to the multidimensional nature of linguistic identities and the interrelatedness between different dimensions of linguistic identities in ELF communication. Copyright ©2024 Routledge.

One type of teacher collaboration termed co-teaching has been gaining popularity in many Asian educational contexts such as Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. The benefits and problems of the co-teaching between a native-English-speaking teacher (NEST) and non-native-English-speaking teacher (NNEST) have been extensively documented in research (e.g., Carless & Walker, 2006; Copland, Davis, Garton, and Mann, 2016). Still, this current study identified research gaps. First, the actual effectiveness of co-teaching as measured by student achievement seemed rare. Second, a quantitative analysis of how two important factors, co-teaching style and co-planning time, actually influenced student achievement during co-teaching was scarce. Third, a detailed qualitative classroom description of how the teachers specifically utilized their strengths in co-teaching practices had not been documented. This study recruited 27 teachers (NESTs and NNESTs) and 270 5th graders in Taiwan. It was found that students’ listening improved after being co-taught for 1 year. In addition, the co-teaching style and the co-planning time influenced students’ listening proficiency differently. Lastly, both qualitative and quantitative results showed that the joint-led teaching style with teachers who co-planned between 2–4 h provided the best results in students’ listening proficiency. Copyright ©2024 National Taiwan Normal University. Department of English.

Teacher feedback has been acknowledged as an important facilitator for students’ learning performance. However, teachers’ feedback efforts are not always found to pay off, especially in the context of Confucian-heritage countries. Scholars are seeking answers from student agencies during feedback-taking. The current study aimed to examine the role of students’ perspective-taking in passing over the effect of teacher feedback on students’ reading test performance. We set the study in Hong Kong, where teacher feedback has often been reported to fail its aims. We used OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 data generated by 5665 15-year-old students. The results of multilevel structural equation modeling confirmed our hypothesis that perspective-taking significantly mediated the relation between teacher feedback and students’ reading achievement. Our results highlight the benefits of accounting for perspective-taking as a key element of student feedback literacy. Implications for future research and practice are discussed. Copyright ©2024 Springer.

Most speakers' first language (L1) in Hong Kong and Guangdong China is Cantonese. Even though the L1 of both Guangdong Cantonese speakers and Hong Kong Cantonese speakers is the same, their second languages (L2) belong to different language families. Previous studies have pointed out that L2 status in third language (L3) acquisition is a salient factor. This study aimed to: (1) examine Guangdong Cantonese speakers' pronunciation error patterns in their L2 Mandarin and L3 English and explore the language interaction patterns among these three languages; (2) compare the findings with those of Hong Kong Cantonese speakers whose L2 is English and L3 Mandarin in Chen and Han (2019. L3 phonology: contributions of L1 and L2 to L3 pronunciation learning by Hong Kong speakers. International Journal of Multilingualism, 16(4), 492-512. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2019.1573901) to identify the roles of L1 and L2 in L3 acquisition. Results of the reading aloud tasks, a questionnaire survey and interview data show that the language interaction patterns among L1, L2 and L3 are influenced by learners' language proficiency. Copyright ©2024 Routledge.

The expansion of English medium instruction (EMI) in higher education has generated significant scholarly interest, resulting in an increasing body of research across different contexts. This bibliometric study examines 1522 publications in the Scopus database to explore the intellectual, conceptual, and social structure of the EMI literature in higher education. Findings revealed substantial growth in publications and citations between 1974 and 2024, showing a notable increase in productivity after 2018. Most cited authors focus on EMI within their affiliated country, but some affiliated with British universities have made global contributions. The field exhibits global coverage, albeit with strong dominance by China, Spain, the UK, Australia, and Hong Kong, as well as limited representation from African nations, barring South Africa. EMI networks are primarily driven by authors’ current and past institutional affiliations as well as geographical proximity, with the UK, Spain, and China emerging as leaders in these networks. The most productive journals focus on multilingualism, bilingualism, language policy, teaching, and learning while also encompassing higher education and multidisciplinary areas. Key topics signal a shift towards translanguaging and classroom interaction. Under-researched areas include (post)colonialism and EMI implementation. These findings provide a comprehensive insight into the evolving landscape of EMI research and potential future directions. Copyright ©2024 MDPI.

In Hong Kong, Chinese and English are considered separate mediums of instruction. English immersion is expected for schools that teach with English as the medium of instruction, and direct instruction in Chinese is often used to teach English in Chinese medium schools. Evidently, a great divide persists in the Hong Kong government curriculum. In the English classroom, translanguaging is considered as detrimental to students' progress or reserved for the lower ability students. The significance of translanguaging on students' identity and meaning making is overlooked due to institutional English-only discourse. This article examines the possibility and potential impact of translanguaging in Hong Kong from the perspective of a student teacher who was an international school student and tuition centre instructor. Copyright ©2024 Routledge.