This paper sets out to offer emic insights into doctoral students' identity formation processes emerging at the interface of their personal biographies and situational doctoral conditions. Leaning on a dialogical theorisation of identity, the study analyses life stories told by four PhD students, focusing on how participants narratively position…

The transition to university life is challenging, involving academic adaptation and social and lifestyle adjustment, so it is no surprise that attrition is at its highest in the first year of attending university. Studies have investigated factors influencing students' adjustment, and the formation of a new learner identity within university has…

In the last two decades, academic reflections on the PhD experience and studies on various aspects of doctoral research education have attracted scholarly attention in the higher education and advanced academic literacy literature. In this article, I adopt a reflective-narrative framework to recount my engagement with the doctoral program at The…

Purpose: While most language departments of the university offer service-learning (SL) subjects based on language teaching, such as "Teaching Chinese as a Second Language in Local Schools" and "Serving the Community through Teaching English," this paper aims to argue that teaching students to teach language(s) is yet to be the…

It is argued that social legitimation is possible through hegemony whereby people of a given social system see the system as legitimate through the naturalness of a way of thinking about issues of all kinds. But, how this naturalness is articulated against a certain context is empirically under-explored. This study attempts to address this issue…

The experiences of participants in disrupted study abroad (SA) programs have been largely overlooked in the literature, especially when it comes to experiences outside the norm. To fill this gap, this research explores the experience of an Australian university student taking part in an exchange program in Hong Kong (HK) during a turbulent period…

In this essay, Chung-Hin Kevin Ho, a history education university student in Hong Kong, narrates his search for civic identity. Composed through a process of critical and reflective dialogue with Hayes Tang, the essay describes the tension between Chung-Hin's Chinese ethnic and cultural identity and the democratic values held by Hong Kongers. As a…

Background: 'Internationalisation' is what makes the University of Hong Kong (HKU) reputable. Ranked as the world top 25, in QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) 2019 World University Ranking, HKU provides students with ample opportunities to experience the global world, to possess a global mind. The HKU Worldwide Exchange Programme, established in 1998 by…

This paper was inspired by three important concerns in higher education, namely, changes in higher education curricula (Bourner, 2004), concept of a fully functioning university (Bourner, 2008), and nature of education, such a university offers (Bourner, Heath, & Rospigliosi, 2013). To prepare university graduates for the unpredictable changes…

This article examines how educational transitions in Hong Kong are concurrently classed processes and practices, and how learner identity is developed and negotiated in an education system that prizes English as capital. Through the lens of habitus, the connected but distinct autobiographical accounts suggest that the stronger the insulation…

This paper highlights how a small group of minority students worked to take advantage of the privileges available once they were admitted to an elite school. The argument proposed is that, unlike their more privileged peers, minority students who have made it through the gateways of elite schools have to work out a salvation of privilege to level…

This study examined students' construction of academic subject identity in a university humanities discipline, English literary studies. In so doing, the study aimed to provide an empirically grounded intervention in current debates on the value of the humanities in higher education. Eight students participated in interviews lasting 15-20 minutes…

Drawing on the approach of narrative inquiry, this study looks into how a novice language teacher educator constructed and reconstructed his professional identities through his research and publishing practice in the higher education context in Hong Kong. The findings of the study show that the participant constantly tried to defend and develop…

This article uses the findings from an empirical study on Hong Kong students' reading practices as collected through face-to-face interviews on major university campuses in Hong Kong to argue for the importance of "affective" and "imaginative" engagement with literary texts if students are to develop an interest in reading.…

This study explores the influence of Confucianism on a professor's learning and parenting. The participant discussed hard work, success, freedom, enjoyment and his perceptions of his father and sons being one of under/over their aspirations. The interplay of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Confucian teachings, parental aspiration and achievement…