Differentiated instruction (DI), an educational philosophy that aims to cater for learner diversity, has been advocated by scholars and teachers over the past two decades. Nevertheless, little is known about how teachers practise DI in online teaching, particularly in the context of English language teaching during the outbreak of the COVID-19…

Effective professional development (PD) in teaching writing involves supporting teachers' knowledge of the writer's craft, including their thinking processes, linguistic knowledge and practical strategies for teaching these. Grammar-for-writing approaches support teachers' knowledge of how grammar creates meaningful effects in writing. While…

Dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty that affects primary school students, which is difficult to tackle through traditional school learning due to limited resources. To this end, large-scale digital learning presents new opportunities to address the need for inclusive education. A unique challenge for students with dyslexia in Hong Kong is…

Life writing is frequently considered as a private act of composition and reflection. What are the benefits and challenges if students are asked to participate in a collaborative life-writing project that aims to capture, explore, and reflect upon the relationship between personal life history, memory and place? In this essay, I will demonstrate…

Writing involves a complex web of deliberations as writers make specific choices from their repertoire of grammatical resources. However, curriculum and assessment criteria that favour top-down prescriptions of writing marginalise the agency of the writer (Gardner, 2012). Conversely, we posit a bottom-up process that integrates grammar teaching…

Substantial research indicates that students' beliefs mediate learning strategies. Nevertheless, students' strategy-related beliefs about feedback and their mediation on strategies to act on feedback are insufficiently addressed. This case study aimed to examine: (1) students' strategy-related beliefs about feedback in L2 writing and (2) how…

Self-directed learning (SDL) is acknowledged as an effective language learning paradigm because learning a language is time-consuming. As language and literacy education is now embracing a more multimodal approach in writing instruction, teachers' multimodal technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPACK) receives growing attention in…

Since the sovereignty of Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, English has remained an official language and been formally referred to as a second language, though in reality it has, arguably, the status of a foreign language. This is especially true for writing because students do not have to write in English outside the classroom.…

Emotions have received widespread attention in the education field globally thanks to the greater emphasis on well-being in recent times. Against this backdrop and the fact that foreign language (FL) education is increasingly common from a young age, this study set out to investigate what FL "classroom activities" children find most…

Chatbots have been increasingly applied for EFL education and demonstrated overall usefulness in improving knowledge and motivation, while this technology has yet to be used for learning logical fallacies (i.e. errors in reasoning) in EFL writing. However, knowledge of logical fallacies is essential, with which learners can avoid fallacies in EFL…

Digital multimodal composing (DMC) allows students to mobilize a wide range of multimodal resources to make meaning. While studies in DMC tended to focus on language-learning contexts, few of them examine its use in content-based courses whereby students are proficient L2 users expected to demonstrate understanding of abstract concepts using DMC.…

This mixed methods study explores EFL students' experiences and perceptions as they learn to write a composition with ChatGPT's support in a classroom instructional context. Students' perceptions are explored in terms of their motivation to learn about ChatGPT, cognitive load and satisfaction with the learning process. In a workshop format,…

Exemplars are samples which illustrate dimensions of quality and enable students to understand assessment expectations. The theoretical basis for using exemplars lies principally in social constructivist approaches to assessment and the notion of tacit knowledge. Through a constructivist grounded theory methodology, this paper theorises how twelve…

In conventional written corrective feedback (WCF) practice, teachers spend an inordinate amount of time identifying every error in student writing. Research evidence suggests that such a comprehensive WCF approach is both undesirable and ineffective. Recent research has shown that focused WCF, where teachers respond to errors selectively, is a…

Teacher feedback can be useful in helping English as Foreign Language (EFL) students revise their draft writing. Investigating how EFL students respond to various types of teacher feedback in draft revision has been regarded as an important field of study. However, such investigation is time-consuming and labour-intensive, which limits its…