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This paper investigates a novel approach to engaging second language learners in their studies. A university level General Education course, which uses Sports Communication as sustained content, is examined. The course uses a progressive pedagogy by way of content-based instruction to integrate vertical and horizontal learning and encourage learner autonomy as a way for students to become critically engaged with their course material. Typical learners’ feedback about the course, from the linguistic, content and pedagogical perspectives, is presented. The learners’ responses illustrate that they are able to develop critical language competencies if they are presented with contexts which stimulate them and are relevant to their popular cultural experiences.

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. This course aims primarily to develop students’ abilities to analyse critical issues and approaches in the study of popular culture. Both locally and globally situated popular cultural references are used in this course to motivate students to think and learn beyond their immediate popular cultural practices. We problematize issues that have arisen in the course such as pedagogy, language, culture and agency and discuss the implications these have for developing and teaching such courses in a multicultural higher-education environment, enabling more critical analysis by students as second language learners.

The affordances of networked digital media to easily create, publish and share content have provided an environment within which creative practices have flourished. A “participatory culture” has emerged, empowering individuals to be involved in the amateur creation and sharing of culture. In addition, the resources available for text creation have expanded to include new, multimodal and hypertextual forms of representation, frequently combined in creative, hybrid ways. As a result of these changes, some language and literacy scholars have called for the development of pedagogies taking “digital literacies” into account. This chapter examines how digital practices might be leveraged in order to promote creativity in the context of higher education. It refers to a creativity enhancing learning environment, an English for science course at a university in Hong Kong. On this course, second and foreign language learners were engaged in an “English for science” project and created a digital video, shared through YouTube, as well as a more traditional text type, a written scientific report. The chapter examines students’ perceptions of these two tasks as they relate to creativity and suggests that, in order to promote creativity, both a “context for creativity” and “resources for creativity” are required.

This article presents a new approach to English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course design. Situated in the context of an English-medium university in Hong Kong, the article describes an undergraduate course in English for science, which focused not only on traditional academic genres but also engaged students in the creation of a multimodal scientific documentary via a digital video project. As part of this project, students carried out a simple scientific experiment, documenting procedures, results and interpretation in the form of a digital video uploaded and shared through YouTube. This method of presenting scientific information not only engaged students in novel, multimodal forms of representation, but also involved them in an online learning community consisting of their tutor, classmates, other peers as well a wider Internet audience. This use of multimodal scientific documentaries as a pedagogical tool in EAP is reported with reference to data drawn from a student questionnaire, interviews with students, and students' comments in a course weblog. The findings show that the students perceived both linguistic and technical value in the construction and sharing of their multimodal documentaries.

In an era when English has become the uncontested world language, this study explores who Chinese non-English majors prefer as their English teachers: English teachers from China (ETCs) or so-called native-speaking English teachers (NETs). This issue has been keenly debated in the Chinese press in recent years. However, it is not a debate in which the voices of the learners and teachers of English have been sufficiently reported through empirical studies. The study draws comprehensive data from 984 college students and their teachers at four universities in different parts of China. On the basis of three cross-validated research methods (questionnaire survey, matched-guise technique, and focused interview), it is argued that, where possible, college English classes should be taught by both ETCs and NETs, since students can benefit from the strengths of both types of teachers. In addition, ETCs should be given opportunities to train in English-speaking countries in order to improve their own English proficiency levels and that only qualified NETs should be recruited to teach college English in China.

This paper is based on a research project looking at the management of self-access language learning (SALL) from the perspective of the managers of self-access centres. It looks at the factors which influence the practice of seven managers of self-access language learning in tertiary institutions in Hong Kong. The discussion centres around five themes: how managers interpret key concepts within the field of learner autonomy and self-access learning, the managers’ beliefs about self-access language learning and the factors which influenced them, the purpose of a self-access centre, and the factors which influence the implementation of self-access learning. Our conclusion is that managing self-access language learning is a complex process and unique to each context but there are underlying principles for effective management of SALL. We identify five of these principles.

This paper examines the degree to which the beliefs of stakeholders in self-access language learning in tertiary institutions in Hong Kong have changed during a 15 year period. To identify changes a comparison is made between the findings of a research study conducted in the mid-1990s in five self-access centres (Gardner and Miller, 1997) and the current situation. The following four key areas are examined: materials for self-access learning, integration of self-access centres and language learning courses, motivation and the effectiveness of a self-access centre. The comparison reveals that the degree of change in these four areas vary. We reflect on the causes of change.

This article explores how Hong Kong Chinese engineering students with low English language proficiency manage to cope with their lectures given in English. An ethnographic case study approach was used with multiple sources of data triangulated to provide a picture of the lecture event from both the students’ and the lecturer’s perspectives. One of the outcomes of the study, as described in this article, is that lectures have specific genres and that these genres need to be seen as more than linguistic events. By way of a case study into lecturer behaviour/intention and students’ perceptions, lectures can be viewed within the wider, socially constructed context.

This paper reports on establishing and running a Self-Access Centre (SAC) in a secondary school in Hong Kong. The impetus for establishing the SAC came from new government curriculum guidelines with a focus on promoting greater autonomy for school students in their English language education. The approach taken in establishing the SAC was to include as many staff as possible in discussions about how to develop autonomy in the school; to ensure teacher development was part of the process of creating the SAC; and to allow students to share in helping to develop, stock, and run the SAC.

This paper presents a new model to account for lecturing in a second language. The lecturing in a second language (LSL) model is based on extensive ethnographic research conducted by myself and with colleagues over the past 10 years at a university in Hong Kong, and in particular of an ethnographic case study of engineering students [Miller, L. (2002). Academic lecturing and listening in a second language: an ethnographic case study. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong]. There are four main themes to the model: the multi-dimensional context of lecturers in a second language; lecturer intention and student interpretation; the negative cycle of expectation; and the establishment of communities of learners and practice. The paper ends with some implications generated from the LSL model for students, their lecturers and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teachers.

This paper presents some aspects of student teachers' perceptions about the suitability and usability of communicative language teaching methods (CLTM) in the language classrooms of Hong Kong. Teacher education around the world emphasises a move towards more communicative teaching methods with interactive student-centred learning encouraged. But for student teachers who have grown up in cultures which often have teacher-centred classrooms, examination and curriculum constraints, and large classes, there is often a mismatch between theoretical methods and reality. The paper describes how a research initiative used to gain an understanding of some of the student teachers' perceptions of CLTM became incorporated in an awareness raising exercise in the methodology course. This move was an attempt to make the course more relevant for the local student teachers involved and provide more support in training them for the classroom. Ultimately it is hoped that such initiatives will encourage student teachers to have more positive attitudes to communicative teaching methods.

This paper shows a range of insights that can be gained for EAP listening comprehension pedagogy from the analysis of a representative authentic lecture. Based on a small survey of academic listening textbooks the salient features identified in the lecture are found to be absent from the textbooks. EAP listening instructors, it is argued, need to supplement their commercial texts by exposing their students to authentic lectures. Only in this way can they prepare them effectively for authentic academic listening.

This paper reports the findings of an investigation into native- English-speaking lecturers lecturing to non-native-English-speaking students at a university in Hong Kong. The study is a follow-up to an earlier investigation on students' perceptions, problems and strategies in attending lectures in a second language (Flowerdew and Miller 1992). The data was collected by means of pre- and post -course interviews, lecturer logs, field notes, observations of lectures, and students' written comments on their lectures. The findings of the investigation are compared with the previous research in the field to provide further insights to support learning and teaching in English.

This paper reports some of the findings of an ethnographic research project into second language lectures conducted at a university in Hong Kong. Six socio-cultural features of lectures where there is a discrepancy in student and lecturer perceptions are presented and discussed, as follows: (1) purposes of lectures; (2) roles of lecturers; (3) styles of lecturing; (4) simplification; (5) listener behaviour; (6) humour. A greater understanding on the part of lecturers and students of each others' perceptions on these issues, it is claimed, is likely to be of value in the preparation of these two groups for participation in second language lectures.

This book combines up-to-date listening theory with case studies of actual pedagogical practice. The paperback edition combines up-to-date listening theory with case studies of actual pedagogical practice. As an essential part of communicative competence, listening is a skill, which deserves equal treatment with the other basic skills of speaking, reading, and writing. The authors describe current models of listening theory and exemplify each with a textbook task. They address the role of technology in teaching listening, questioning techniques, and testing. This text is designed for use with both pre-service and in-service teachers who are involved in the teaching of listening or the design of pedagogic materials for listening.

This article reports on one aspect of the findings of a 3-year ethnographic study into academic lectures conducted at a university in Hong Kong, where native speakers of English lecture to ethnic Chinese ESL students. Based on ethnographic data, the article develops a framework for the analysis of L2 lectures. The framework has four dimensions: ethnic culture, local culture, academic culture, and disciplinary culture. Each of the dimensions is illustrated by means of data from the ethnographic research. The article suggests that application of the model, because of its potential for developing cultural synergy, is likely to be of interest for those involved in the lecture preparation of lecturers and students in an L2, both in Hong Kong and elsewhere.

This article describes a study that used primarily in-depth interviews to investigate the attitudes of 20 lecturers towards the English medium of instruction policy at a Hong Kong university at the moment of the former British colony's transition to Chinese sovereignty. The results of the study document the overall attitudes of the lecturers towards the policy, their reasons for supporting it, their problems in applying it, and their reported use of Cantonese to overcome their problems in applying it. The rather ambivalent attitude towards English that the study reveals is seen as indicative of the sociolinguistic tensions within the society at large. The article concludes with a discussion of ways to tackle the perceived problems.

Introduction John Flowerdew and Tracey Costley Investigating local sociocultural and institutional contexts for discipline-specific writing Richard W. Forest and Tracy S. Davis Developing writing courses for specific academic purposes Helen Basturkmen The role of grammar in the discipline-specific writing curriculum Jack Richards and Lindsay Miller Approaches and perspectives on teaching vocabulary for discipline-specific academic writing Averil Coxhead Using genre analysis to teach writing in the disciplines Sunny Hyon Teaching writing for science and technology Jean Parkinson Using annotated bibliographies to develop student writing in social sciences Damian Fitzpatrick and Tracey Costley Discipline-specific writing for business students: research, practice and pedagogy Julio Gimenez Teaching English for Research Publication Purposes with a focus on genre, register, textual mentors and language re-use: a case study John Flowerdew and Simon Ho Wang Introducing corpora and corpus tools into the technical writing classroom through Data-Driven Learning (DDL) Laurence Anthony Critical literacy writing in ESP: perspectives and approaches Christian W. Chun Towards a specific writing language assessment at Hong Kong universities Jane Lockwood