The medium of instruction (MOI) has been a bone of contention in Hong Kong, a former British colony, since its colonial days. Despite the Hong Kong government's effort to promote the "biliterate and trilingual" language policy, advocating Cantonese, English and Putonghua as the three official spoken languages and emphasizing the…

The study employs a case study approach to examine the impact of educational backgrounds on nine Hong Kong tertiary students' English and Cantonese language practices and identifications as native speakers of English and Cantonese. The study employed both survey and interview data to probe the participants' English and Cantonese language use at…

Adopting a case study approach with multiple data sources, this paper explores the ways in which rapport is built, and its impact on the learning process based on five successive writing support consultations between a native English-speaking (NES) tutor and her second language (L2) tutee in a Hong Kong university. With reference to the prepared…

There has been an increasing interest in and hence a growing number of research studies on content and language integrated learning (CLIL) over the past two decades. One of the on-going debates in CLIL is on bilingualism versus monolingualism, or the role of the first language (L1) in subject teaching. So far, very few research projects have been…

Short stories are considered as good resources that can be used in language classrooms. Laine (1997) suggests that in foreign language classes where there are children who are not motivated and who are low achievers, a story, if it is well-chosen, can help change their attitudes to the language. And, the narrative (or storytelling) approach is…