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This paper explores the metalinguistic tactics used by Hong Kong protesters in 2014 and 2019 and how they reflected and exploited a range of dominant ideologies about language in the city. These tactics are considered both in terms of their rhetorical utility in the "message war" between protesters and authorities, and their significance in the broader sociolinguistic context of Hong Kong. The analysis reveals how such tactics entailed both opportunities and risks, allowing protesters to create shareable discursive artifacts that spread quickly over social media and to promote in-group solidarity and distrust of their political opponents, but also limiting their ability to broaden the appeal of their messages to certain segments of the population and implicating them in upholding language ideologies that promote exclusion and marginalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This paper explores the status and function of English among gay men in Hong Kong through the analysis of postings about English on a popular gay internet forum. The forum, gayhk.com, while mainly featuring discussions about sex, fashion, entertainment and relationships, also contains a surprising amount of discussion about the English language, mostly taking the form of what Cameron refers to as 'verbal hygiene' - the enforcement of language 'standards' through the criticism of the language use of particular individuals or groups. The analysis of these postings sees them not just as evidence of language attitudes within the gay community, but also as tools with which Chinese gay men in postcolonial Hong Kong position themselves in relation to one another, in relation to 'foreign' gay men, and in relation to the wider population of Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates employer perceptions of the nature and importance of the English language in public relations agencies in Hong Kong. Based on in-depth interviews with senior managers from eight Hong Kong-based public relations companies, it examines how the linguistic currency of English is used collaboratively in creative organizations. Findings suggest that English is used as the common language among transnational public relations work teams and the clients that they service. It is also used as a creative resource for facilitating collaboration, staff development and socialization into corporate and professional cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper reports the results of a study comparing the interactional dynamics of face-to-face and on-line peer-tutoring in writing by university students in Hong Kong. Transcripts of face-to-face tutoring sessions, as well as logs of on-line sessions conducted by the same peer-tutors, were coded for speech functions using a system based on Halliday''s functional-semantic view of dialogue. Results show considerable differences between the interactional dynamics in on-line and face-to-face tutoring sessions. In particular, face-to-face interactions involved more hierarchal encounters in which tutors took control of the discourse, whereas on-line interactions were more egalitarian, with clients controlling the discourse more. Differences were also found in the topics participants chose to focus on in the two modes, with issues of grammar, vocabulary, and style taking precedence in face-to-face sessions and more “global” writing concerns like content and process being discussed more in on-line sessions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper examines the ways young people in Hong Kong at different stages of involvement with illegal drugs respond to government produced anti-drug television commercials through a methodology which provided them with the technical skills and equipment to make their own short videos about drugs. An analysis of the videos they produced and their interaction while producing them reveals that participants with different drug-taking experiences have very different and often multiple ways of talking about drugs, and that these different 'discourses' and the ways they are deployed in different contexts affect how 'at-risk' they are for new or continued drug use and how they respond to anti-drug messages designed to mitigate this risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between language, culture, and identity in a corpus of gay personal ads collected from two publications in Hong Kong in the three years before the 1997 transition of sovereignty. Gay personal ads are seen as an "island of discourse," whose marginal nature is reflected in the use of language and in turn reflects issues of marginalization in the larger social context. Using Fairciough's (1992, 1993) three-dimensional model for critical discourse analysis, an attempt is made to uncover the relationship between text structure and issues of power/ideology in the society that produces the texts. On the level of text, it was found that structural components, particularly the degree of grammatica1 elaboration, differ according to the stated race or cultural background of the authors and their targets. On the level of discourse practice, authors were found to appropriate a variety of "voices "from the larger culture arena, the use of which amplifies or limits the participation of particular classes of individuals. Finally, on the level of social practice, the ads were found to reflect and re-create both the racial stereotypes and heterosexist ideology found in the dominant culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the HIV infection issue in Hong Kong with special reference to two HIV positive individuals in the territory. These two persons have voluntarily made public their seropositivity. One of the two was a British dentist named Mike Sinclair, who disclosed his condition to the media in 1992 and died in 1995 and other was J.J. Chan, a local Chinese disc-jockey, who came forward in 1995 and died just a few months later. After making their revelations, both became instant media personalities and were invited by the Hong Kong Government to act as spokespeople for AIDS awareness and prevention. This article explores how the public identities of these two figures have been constructed in the cultural context of Hong Kong where both Eastern and Western values exist side by side and interact. The effect of culture on the way 'AIDS celebrities' are constructed has implications for the way societies view the issue of AIDS and treat those who have it. It also helps reveal possible sites of difficulty when individuals of different cultures communicate about the issue.

• Algorithms affect practices of reading and writing as well as broader patterns of language use, communication and consumption. • This paper describes a participatory project, in which university students explored their 'folk beliefs' about algorithms. • The participants articulated six metaphors through which they and their classmates understand how algorithms work • Engaging learners in 'folk beliefs' about algorithms can contribute to critical online reading practices. Most accounts of the way digital technologies have changed practices of reading and writing have focused on surface aspects of digital texts (such as hypertextuality, multimodality and the development of new registers). There are, however, less visible aspects of digital communication environments that have had an equally profound effect on reading and writing – namely the algorithms that lie behind texts that monitor the actions of readers and writers and alter the form and content of the texts they are exposed to. Algorithms have the potential to affect not just local communication practices, but also broader social practices, as they work to encourage and reinforce patterns of language use, communication and consumption. This paper describes the results of a two-year long participatory project, in which university students in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom explored the communication and inference forming practices they engage in when interacting with algorithms. The participants articulated six primary metaphors through which they and their classmates understand how algorithms work: (1) Algorithm as agent; (2) Algorithm as authority; (3) Algorithm as adversary; (4) Algorithm as communicative resource; (5) Algorithm as audience; and (6) Algorithm as oracle. Engaging learners in articulating the 'folk beliefs' that govern people's interaction with algorithms, it is argued, can contribute to the development of the kinds of digital literacies they will need to better understand the ways algorithms affect the kinds of information they are exposed to, the kinds of inferences they form about this information, and the ways their own acts of reading and writing can be used by algorithms to manipulate them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]