Effective professional development (PD) in teaching writing involves supporting teachers' knowledge of the writer's craft, including their thinking processes, linguistic knowledge and practical strategies for teaching these. Grammar-for-writing approaches support teachers' knowledge of how grammar creates meaningful effects in writing. While training initiatives support teachers' knowledge of writing processes, more is needed to transfer process knowledge into effective teaching. Synthesising writerly processes with grammar-for-writing strategies may support teachers' classroom practice. This article explores the development of a workshop for teachers on a novel imaginative embodiment approach for teaching narrative writing, which links imaginative thinking and linguistic knowledge. The article reports on a study with Year 5 international school teachers in Hong Kong and their perceived efficacy of the approach after trialling it in their classrooms throughout a narrative writing unit, with the purpose of informing future teacher training. Findings from semi-structured interviews showed that teachers perceived imaginative embodiment as supporting their insider understanding of writing processes through purposeful and specific strategies resulting in student improvements. However, unfamiliarity with the approach and insecure linguistic subject knowledge resulted in a steep learning curve. It is argued that imaginative embodiment training may develop teachers' understanding of, and strategies for, teaching the link between narrative imagination and grammatical choice, but training should cater to teachers' prior linguistic knowledge. Copyright © 2024 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Cantonese-English learners in Hong Kong confront with substantial difficulty in development of English relative clauses. This study aims at verifying predictions of hypotheses about second language learners' development of English relative clauses with data of written Hong Kong English. wh relatives and that relatives in the Hong Kong component of the International Corpus of English were identified. Frequencies of occurrence of distinct types of relative clauses in the Hong Kong component were compared to evaluate whether predictions of Keenan and Comrie's (1977) Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy, Kuno's (1974) Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis, and Hamilton's (1994) Subject-Object Hierarchy Hypothesis are supported by the corpus data respectively. Results indicate that the Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis is supported by data of written Hong Kong English whilst the other two hypotheses are partially supported only. Hypotheses supported by corpus data of written Hong Kong English are suggested to inform English language education in Hong Kong by illuminating the instructional order of different types of English relative clauses. Copyright © 2025 John Benjamins Publishing Co.

Some previous studies have found that teachers are sensitive to traditional prescriptions such as the use of whom rather than who in object function, and between you and me rather than between you and I. This paper aims to examine whether Australian teachers as native speakers of English and Hong Kong teachers as non-native English speakers still display such conservative attitudes towards disputable usages these days. Data were collected via two elicitation tests. In the first survey, 34 Australian teachers and 37 Hong Kong teachers were invited to participate in a judgement test. Their responses were compared with those of students. In the second survey, 73 Australian teachers, 70 Hong Kong teachers, 207 Australian students and 188 Hong Kong students were presented with a proofreading test. The findings showed significant differences between teachers and students towards disputable usages. Both Australian teachers and Hong Kong teachers had a higher tendency to reject and replace items such as different to, less + plural noun and final prepositions. This suggests that tolerance diminishes with involvement in teaching and familiarity with prescriptive rules. Pedagogical implications of these findings are also discussed. Copyright © 2001 SAGE Publications.

The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools (e.g. ChatGPT) has elicited mixed reactions among English language instructors and learners. This study explores how first-year students in an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course at a Hong Kong university perceive GenAI and traditional grammar-checking tools (e.g. Grammarly, MS Word). We employed a qualitative methodology grounded in the interpretivist paradigm, conducting semi-structured interviews with 14 students. The findings revealed the students perceived GenAI tools to be more comprehensive and authoritative, as they provide detailed explanations and contextual insights that enhance language proficiency. However, they also noted concerns about overreliance, data privacy and equitable access to premium features. The study examines the ethical and pedagogical implications of integrating GenAI tools into higher education, highlighting their potential and the necessity of institutional guidance. It contributes to the ongoing discourse on the role of GenAI in academic writing instruction. Copyright © 2024 The Author(s).

Teacher written feedback (TWF) refers to the written comments, corrections and responses offered by second language (L2) teachers on students’ writing drafts. This practice, being considered common and important in scaffolding L2 students’ writing process and improving writing products, has attracted significant research attention.Among the existing literature, two gaps have been discovered. Firstly, the majority concentrated on written corrective feedback (WCF), indicating feedback exclusively on linguistic and grammatical errors. However, in many English-teaching classes, teachers not only provide linguistic feedback, but also deliver feedback on non-linguistic aspects of writing problems, including content, organisation, genre and linguistic use. Moreover, L2 students were found to expect different aspects of TWF in their writing. Thus, research on WCF exclusively is insufficient to generate a comprehensive comprehension of TWF, does not reflect the teaching practice in authentic classes and ignores the preferences of students. Secondly, research on TWF was mostly quasi-experimental, investigating the efficacy of feedback on writing performance. This overemphasis on the written products as evidence of learning overlooks the learning that could happen during the process where students engage with TWF and the individual and contextual factors that come into play during the process. Thus, there is a call for more research on learner engagement with teacher feedback on all aspects (i.e. local, global and praises) and how various writer-related and contextual factors mediate engagement. To respond to this call, the current qualitative longitudinal case study tried to fill the gap by investigating how Chinese English-major university students with diverse English proficiency levels engaged with TWF from cognitive, behavioural and affective perspectives in a naturalistic classroom setting as well as examined individual and contextual factors that mediated student engagement

A corpus provides extraordinarily rich and flexible resources for self-learning and can guide students in finding answers to their language queries. Although corpus linguistics has become mainstream in language research, a corpus-based language teaching approach remains largely unknown to the frontline teachers due to various reasons. In the past few years, our EdUHK corpus team have been working towards bridging the gap between corpus linguistic research and teachers’ teaching practice by introducing a corpus-based language pedagogy (CBLP) to English teachers in Hong Kong, China’s Mainland and elsewhere. In this presentation, we will focus on an awardwinning website, The Corpus-based Platform for Language Teachers (CAP) (https://corpus.eduhk.hk/cap/), and demonstrate how we theorised CBLP and enacted CBLP training for in-service and pre-service English teachers through the learning and teaching resources we created on the CAP website. The CAP website serves as the ideal pathway to transfer our expertise in corpus linguistics to the broad teacher community in Hong Kong, China’s Mainland, and other regions/countries. We will first provide the theoretical framework for CBLP and then use concrete examples from the CAP website to show how we implemented the CBLP training for our target participants to help them develop competence to learn and teach with corpora. Copyright © 2022 ICELEAL.

Traditional grammar pedagogy conceptualizing grammar as rules of thumb fails to provide learners with comprehensive, accurate, or systematic knowledge on the system. The present classroom-based study aims at investigating application of an alternative pedagogical grammar method integrating the pedagogical framework of systemic theoretical instruction and the linguistic framework of cognitive grammar to instruction on the English tense system. Four instructional sessions were conducted in an English language classroom in a Hong Kong secondary school, and impacts of the pedagogy on students' grammatical production were examined by means of tests and focus group interviews. The pedagogical approach was discovered to exert limited impacts on students' controlled and free grammatical production statistically, yet the effect size of the pedagogy on students' grammatical production was large. Several factors ought to be taken into consideration in application of the pedagogy to second language grammar instruction. Copyright © Chinese American Educational Research and Development Association.

In this paper, we proposed a productive failure instructional design (Kapur, 2008) to enhance Hong Kong secondary students’ English grammar learning and collaborative problem-solving skills in a MCSCL environment. It is believed that the pedagogical implications of this study will make contributions to the technology-enhanced language learning field. In addition, insight gained from this study will hopefully extend to investigating the impact of productive failure pedagogical design on listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills in the L2 acquisition. Copyright © 2019 Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education.

The paper explores and describes the kinds of learning attained by a group of Hong Kong preservice teachers who worked collaboratively to develop online grammar teaching resources for school teachers worldwide. Based on the quantitative and qualitative data collected during the ongoing collaboration, lesson tryouts, and post-project evaluation, the project results reflect the value of experiential learning in preservice teacher education. The themes that detail the student teachers’ experiences include textbook evaluation, professional knowledge, core competencies of teachers, and understanding of English language teaching outside the Hong Kong context. Copyright © 2019 Social Science Press.