Language learners and teachers' cognition in respect of learning and teaching plays a critical role in mediating their actual behaviour and decisions in the process. This study investigates the vocabulary learning and teaching beliefs held by pre-service and in-service teachers in Hong Kong and on the Chinese mainland so that teacher education…

This inquiry aimed to examine the benefits of having international field experience for a group of Hong Kong postgraduate student teachers who joined a six-week immersion programme in New Zealand. Through participants' reflections, interviews and programme evaluations, the present investigation found that the overseas field experience not only…

In this study, we examined the intercorrelations among speech perception, metalinguistic (i.e., phonological and morphological) awareness, word reading, and vocabulary in a 1st language (L1) and a 2nd language (L2). Results from 3 age groups of Chinese-English bilingual children showed that speech perception was more predictive of reading and…

This 1-year longitudinal study examined the extent to which morphological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and phonological awareness, along with speeded naming, uniquely explained word recognition, dictation (i.e., spelling), and reading comprehension among 171 young Hong Kong Chinese children. With age and vocabulary knowledge statistically…

Metalinguistic awareness (an awareness about the structure of orthography) had been considered vital for reading acquisition. The awareness of phonological regularity and consistency had been found in advanced readers in recent research. Evidence based on simplified Chinese suggested the effect of semantic transparency on reading in school…

This article describes a strategy employed on a teacher training course in Hong Kong involving the use of lesson transcriptions. Transcriptions from two course participants' English lessons were used to arouse greater classroom language awareness and promote reflection in one of the teachers, who was initially very reluctant to accept comments and…

Two hundred and ninety-six English majors at universities in Poland, Austria and Hong Kong were given a 50-item questionnaire designed to evaluate their knowledge of grammatical terminology. The main aim was to identify whether the three populations were subject to differing "terminological cultures". This was found to be substantially…

The current study investigates the phonemic awareness and nonword processing of English as a foreign language students from Hong Kong and Mainland China, with reference to factors considered the main facilitators of phonemic awareness: written language experience, spoken language experience, and metalinguistic training. The Mainland Chinese…

This study investigates the effects of parent-child shared book reading and metalinguistic training on the language and literacy skills of 148 kindergartners in Hong Kong. Children were pretested on Chinese character recognition, vocabulary, morphological awareness, and reading interest and then assigned randomly to 1 of 4 conditions: the dialogic…

Codemixing of Cantonese Chinese and English is a common speech behaviour used by bilingual people in Hong Kong. Though codemixing is repeatedly criticised as a cause of the decline of students' language competence, there is little hard evidence to indicate its detrimental effects. This study examines the use of mixed code in the context of the…

Self-repetition is commonly found in spoken discourse, and it could be argued that it is an interactional necessity. Self-repetition in spontaneous talk is pervasive and performs a variety of functions. Some regard it as signalling redundancy, disfluency, or both, in spoken language, whereas others consider it to be facilitating the production of…

This paper explores the sociolinguistic awareness in English of tertiary level students in Hong Kong and Wuhan (Mainland China). The language data consisted of specific instances when a native speaker presenter made changes, in the course of oral delivery, to the written text of a conference paper that she had prepared in advance. Matched pairs of…

This paper examines the out-of-class English language learning activities of student teachers in Hong Kong, using questionnaires, interviews and learner diaries. The study found that while many of the students devoted considerable time to studying and practising English outside the classroom, much of this time was spent on more receptive…

This paper investigates L2 English learners' reactions to mixed personality in a pedagogic grammar. Personality refers to how authors represent themselves in a text and interact with their readers (e.g. personally via the use of personal pronouns or impersonally via the use of the passive, etc.); mixed personality occurs when an author switches…

Metadiscourse is self-reflective linguistic expressions referring to the evolving text, to the writer, and to the imagined readers of that text. It is based on a view of writing as a social engagement and, in academic contexts, reveals the ways writers project themselves into their discourse to signal their attitudes and commitments. In this…