This study investigates the impact of Filipina domestic workers (FilDWs), a marginalized group in Hong Kong (HK), on HK children's language development. It focusses on FilDWs' influence on the second language (L2) English of bilingual HK primary school children attending an English Medium of Instruction school. The elements investigated are L2…

This paper probes alternative meanings and processes for decolonizing English that arise from the particular geopolitical histories and identities of Hong Kong and engagement with political and translingual activism. I illustrate the positioning and tension between English, 'Kongish' (a mix of English and localized linguistic resources in Hong…

A growing number of studies have explored the ways how teachers contingently respond to students' unexpected responses or a lack of student responses in second language classrooms. From a sociocultural perspective, teacher contingency involves a departure from the lesson plan in local response to the unexpected or unforeseeable actions in the…

Recent studies on English-Medium-Instruction (EMI) classroom interaction have begun to look at the role of translanguaging as a pedagogical practice in supporting participants to exploit multilingual and multimodal resources to facilitate content teaching and learning. The present study contributes to this growing body of literature by focusing on…

Discourse particles are ubiquitous in spoken discourse. Yet despite their pervasiveness very few studies attempt to look at their use in the pedagogical setting. Drawing on data from an intercultural corpus of speech and a textbook database, the present study compares the use of discourse particles by expert users of English in Hong Kong with…

This article reports on the results of a study which investigated advanced Cantonese English as a Second Language (ESL) learners' use of a monolingual dictionary for determining the meanings of familiar English words used in less familiar contexts. Thirty-two university English majors in Hong Kong participated in a dictionary consultation task,…

This study examines and compares the production of discourse markers by native speakers and learners of English based on a pedagogic sub-corpus from CANCODE, a corpus of spoken British English, and a corpus of interactive classroom discourse of secondary pupils in Hong Kong. The results indicate that in both groups discourse markers serve as…

This study investigated whether top-down or bottom-up cognitive processing was more important in listening comprehension in large-scale English-as-a-Second-Language tests administered to secondary school students in Hong Kong over a period of seven years. Results suggest that bottom-up processing was more important than top-down processing in…