This study explores the impacts of popular music education in classroom practices from different aspects such as learning by ear, motivation, musicianship, peer learning and creativity. The Sing by Ear approach was created based on the concepts of informal learning in singing a cappella. A total of 323 participants aged 11-14 were invited to…

It is common in the everyday art class to find many examples of avoidance, omission and exaggeration in young adolescents' depictions of the human figure. When students depict sophisticated human images, they make every effort to avoid the difficult parts, and some students tend to exaggerate the size or distort the shape of the human image. Art…

To understand long-term motivations for second language (L2) learning/socialisation, this study analyses the biographical narratives of 30 Hong Kong Chinese who are proficient in Japanese by using ethnographic interviews. From a situated learning perspective, our research findings originate in the participants' transformational episodes and centre…

Academic integrity is a quality that all university students must understand and practice. Despite it being a compulsory part of the curriculum in any discipline, cases of violation still arise, suggesting an ineffective learning experience. The author addresses two issues in the teaching of academic integrity--content materials and modes of…

The educational potentials of social media both in the formal and informal learning contexts have been widely acknowledged. However, how social media use in the informal contexts might influence students' learning in the formal contexts is still underexplored. Path analysis of 141 survey responses from secondary school ethnic minority students in…

The integration of popular culture into English language learning has recently been formalised in the Hong Kong New Senior Secondary curriculum, with the development of critical reading indicated as one of the key objectives. Whether and how students respond to popular culture texts is, however, under-researched. The present paper reports findings…

This article reports on an exploratory study responding to the problem of understanding how young learners position themselves as speakers of a foreign language. A group of 24 Hong Kong primary-school children (ages 10-12) who are in the process of simultaneously learning English and developing narratives of identities as English speakers,…

Popular culture materials are generally believed to have positive effects on L2 learning. This study examined the effectiveness of popular culture materials in enhancing Hong Kong EFL students' grammar learning. In a quasi-experimental design, 20 secondary school students were taught grammar in two ways: with the use of popular culture materials,…

This paper reports on how and why proficient learners of English in Hong Kong participated in popular culture, out-of-class activities, with an emphasis on their development of learner autonomy. Autonomy in language learning is defined as an individual's ability and responsibility to take charge of his or her own learning [1]. Out-of-class…

This paper explores the attitudes of teachers, as adult learners, towards learning to do animation. A part of popular culture which second-language students enjoy, until recently, animation has been technically too demanding for non-specialists to learn. Adult learners can experience e-learning as transformative, but also as a barrier. Thus,…

This article examines an established course on Popular Culture which is framed within the general educational model in an English-medium university. The article is organized into three parts: the underlining educational rationale for general educational courses, the course description, and the students' perspectives of their learning experience.…

Hong Kong popular culture played an important role in the construction and consolidation of Hong Kong identity long before the handover to China. In the past few years leading up to the 10th anniversary of the handover, both Hong Kong and China have undergone numerous changes which seem to be changing their relations. Whilst Hong Kong people had…

This article examines portrayals of female gamblers in recent Hong Kong movies. The authors report that the depiction of female gamblers is very different from that of male gamblers in the movies made in the same period. Whereas the male gamblers are pitching a lonely and desperate battle against an evil opponent, the female gamblers portrayed in…

Code-switching research has focused on spontaneous conversation, and code-switching has often been seen as a consequence of bilinguals attending to and extending the "macro" status and functions of the two languages in society, attitudes towards these languages, and their cultural connotations, for instance, the "we-code" vs.…

Nearly every school in Hong Kong claims to provide ethics/religious education as part of the curriculum, but teachers find it difficult to teach values and attitudes without having students find ethics/religious lessons boring. While much has been said about how students learn, it remains that it is the teacher s task to provide the relevant…