The present study aimed to develop and validate a questionnaire assessing parents' beliefs about, and attitudes toward, supporting young children's English as a second/foreign language development -- Parent English Language Belief and Attitude Questionnaire (PELBA-Q). The PELBA-Q was piloted with 173 parents of kindergarten-aged children and…

The mission of universities today is not only to nurture experts in various professions, but also to cultivate lifelong autonomous learners. Independent learning and pedagogies that aim to foster learner autonomy have grown in importance over the past decade. However, the extent to which independent learning is successful in fostering autonomy has…

Different approaches have been used to teach EFL students summary writing, including a genre-based approach (Chen & Su, 2012), implementing key words and question generation (Chou, 2012), and automatic scaffolding and concept mapping (Yang, 2015). This study aims to explore the effectiveness of another approach--one that might be more…

This study compared the effects of social persuasion from parents and teachers on students' self-efficacy in reading comprehension in English as a foreign language. Ninety-nine Grade 8 Chinese students in a secondary school in Hong Kong completed a questionnaire with six scenarios which tapped their self-efficacy after receiving positive and…

In order to enhance ESL students' motivation to learn learning English, teachers around the world have been employing various motivational strategies in classrooms. However, there is scarce research focusing on both alignments and misalignments of secondary students' evaluation of the effectiveness of motivational strategies (MS) and teachers' use…

This paper looks at the continued survival of "myths" about English grammar, for example, the statement that in negative and interrogative sentences "any" should be used instead of "some". It is based on a survey of 195 Hong Kong students majoring in English, in five different cohorts, which found that such myths are…

Learners with poor reading skills are less able to acquire knowledge through text. Graphic novels may enhance reading comprehension skills owing to fewer words, more pictures, and an engaging storyline. This study considered the reading skills of 188 Chinese-English bilingual undergraduates, comparing their reading comprehension performance after…

Writing at the doctoral level presents many challenges for second language writers. This paper reports on a longitudinal study investigating English as a second language (ESL) doctoral students' writing problems and the strategies they developed to meet these challenges. Eight students were interviewed four times over a two-year period during…

This paper reports on the findings of a study looking at students' motivation to engage in self-access language learning (SALL) while taking an English for Academic Purposes course which contains a substantial integrated SALL component. To-date there has been limited research into the motivation of such students but it is an important area of…

This study investigates the perceptions of stakeholders on the impact of a high-stakes assessment of English language teachers' proficiency--the minimum language standards Language Proficiency Assessment for Teachers (English) [LPATE], which was introduced in 2000. Given that the test has now been in place for 17 years, the study investigates the…

Emerging mobile technologies can be considered a new form of social and cultural artefact that mediates people's language learning. This multi-case study investigates how mobile technologies mediate a group of Hong Kong university students' L2 learning, which serves as a lens with which to capture the personalised, unique, contextual and…

This study examines Hong Kong major stakeholders' (secondary students, university students, teachers and professionals) perceptions of language variation, English language teaching (ELT) and language use in their everyday communication via a large-scale questionnaire survey (N = 1893). Based on principal components analysis of the questionnaire…

This study investigated the differential influences of maternal and paternal factors on Chinese children's English as a foreign language development. It took into account both behavioral (i.e. parental home literacy practices, HLP; and children's vocabulary knowledge) and emotional (i.e. parental and children's foreign language reading anxiety,…

An increasing number of studies have looked at the value of corpus-based data-driven learning (DDL) for second language (L2) written error correction, with generally positive results. However, a potential conundrum for language teachers involved in the process is how to provide feedback on students' written production for DDL. The study looks at…

In diglossic contexts, when speakers typically use two different languages on a regular basis, bilingual speakers display a wide array of attitudes towards each of their languages and associated cultures (Galindo, 1995) and such variability in attitudes can affect their linguistic behaviors (Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner & Fillenbaum, 1960).…