The exam-oriented education system in Hong Kong has created a language learning environment that is largely confined to traditional classroom settings, which may not take best advantage of students' abilities to relate what they have learnt in class to real-life scenarios. Such learning environments may have implications for the way second…

Fluent speakers of a target language choosing to enrol in beginner-level courses at tertiary institutes could be considered unfair. In this paper, however, based on data obtained from in-depth qualitative interviews with 12 students at a Hong Kong university, we show that fluent speakers of Japanese -- a widely-spoken foreign language in Hong Kong…

This paper examines how flows of people, media, money, technology, and ideologies move through the world, with attention to how these scapes (Appadurai 1990, 1996, 2013) shape identity construction among language learners, both in and out of classrooms. After illustrating intersecting scapes in sociolinguistic terms, I explore the relevance of…

This paper reports on a blended-learning project that aims to develop a web-based library of interpreting practice resources built on the course management system Blackboard for Hong Kong interpretation students to practise outside the classroom. It also evaluates the library's effectiveness for learning, based on a case study that uses it to…

In this paper we report a case study of two first-year students at a university in Hong Kong doing the same writing assignment that required the use of sources. We explore the students' understanding of plagiarism, their strategies for composing, the similarity between their texts and source texts, and the lecturer's assessment of their work. The…