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…

Against the backdrop of rapidly growing attention to FL learners' emotions, the present study investigated learners' classroom emotions (anxiety, boredom, and enjoyment), literacy outcomes (reading and writing proficiency), and a largely neglected factor in FL emotions research to date -- maternal education as a proxy for socio-economic status.…

Peer assessment has been frequently used to improve students' academic writing skills. However, how to address students' unsatisfactory attitude during the peer assessment process remains a major challenge to further improve students' learning outcome and engagement. In our project, we implemented Interactive Peer Assessment, which comprised…

Integrated writing (i.e., writing from sources) being a complex process, requires various linguistic and cognitive skills interacting with each other in a dynamic way. While recent studies have increasingly documented that writing processes are driven by a suite of cognitive abilities named executive function (EF), their roles in a literacy…

The role of parental literacy skills in cross-linguistic transfer, the phenomenon of the sharing of skills and competence from one language to another, is under-researched. The present study tested 147 Hong Kong Chinese children and their parents (76 boys; mean age = 7.16). Parental literacy skills significantly explained children's reading and…

This research aims to investigate the effects of two teaching sequences -- interleaving and blocking -- on the participants' use of three types of cohesive devices (conjunctions, conjunctive adverbs and prepositions [thereafter CCPs]) in their argumentative essays. The participants included 50 native Cantonese-speaking university students taking…

This research project involved a mixed-methods study investigating language-related challenges of first-year students at an English Medium Instruction (EMI) university in Hong Kong. The two-phased sequential study employed a questionnaire survey and semi-structured student interviews. The survey and interview findings indicate that first-year…

Appropriate use of cohesive devices is an important writing skill. Recently, there has been growing research on cohesiveness in ESL students' texts at university level. However, research into secondary school students' writing and learners' perceptions of cohesive devices has remained underexplored. This case study investigated the use of…

Background: Studies have shown that word dictation and syntactic skills are significant predictors of written composition performance among Chinese children in elementary grades. However, there is a paucity of research on the bidirectional relationships between these two cognitive-linguistic skills (i.e., word dictation and syntactic skills) and…

This study developed and validated a Chinese name writing scale (CNWS) for evaluating early handwriting skills of kindergarten children. We then used the validated CNWS to examine the developmental characteristics of Chinese name writing skills among kindergarten children in Hong Kong in a cross-sectional study. CNWS was developed based on English…

This study aimed to investigate the impact of using an automated tracking system on the writing performance of English as Foreign Language (EFL) students in a 13-week academic writing course. Sixty-eight first year university students participated in the study. They received the same instruction on academic writing and were allocated to one of two…

Integrated writing is increasingly used in language assessment programmes. As a hybrid task, it requires students to coordinate different language skills, i.e. listening, reading and writing, to retrieve information from multiple sources, and compose an essay for a specific purpose. Tapping into the varied skills that contribute to successful…

This study investigates the impact of feedback generated by large language models (LLMs) on improving the essay-writing skills of first-year university students in Hong Kong. Specifically, it examines how generative AI supports students in revising their essays, enhances engagement with writing tasks, and influences their emotional responses…

The various possibilities that social media offers to language learners and teachers have long been recognized by researchers within the field of language instruction, and many studies have been carried out in an attempt to address and unpack its potential contributions. This paper aims to review such research on the use of mainstream social media…

Parents, teachers and policy makers are concerned about how immigrant students acquire the mainstream language and achieve academic success. Therefore, researchers face an urgent need to examine the broader ecological factors that influence immigrant students' academic identity construction and mainstream language learning. This study investigates…