Raising Native Cultural Awareness through WeChat: a case study with Chinese EFL students By Junjie Gavin Wu & Lindsay Miller

By Heidi, Xiang, Amy, Liz Imagine your English-speaking friends asking questions about Chinese food, but you can’t express yourself well in English. How can your cultural knowledge and English competency be improved? Photo by Chaliceks on Pixabay  Introduction  Owing to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, university language teachers should incorporate native cultural topics into the English […]

Multimodal Design for Our Writing (Building on On becoming facilitators of multimodal composing and digital design by Diane D. Belcher)

Edited by Jaclyn, Joyce, Ada and Bay If you are asked to write an essay in your L2, what comes to your mind first? Is it a piece of writing with lengthy sentences, elusive grammar, or large paragraphs? Or is it strictly structured like the five-paragraph essay sample below which is frequently used in our TOFEL and IELTS tests? Sometimes, it seems […]

Gaming and Second Language Curriculum in Hong Kong: Inherently Exclusive or Mutually Inclusive (Building on digital gaming and language learning: Autonomy and community by Alice Chik)

Edited by Jason, Florence, Silver and Ceci The role of digital gaming in East Asian countries has commonly been perceived as detrimental to students’ academic performances (Gentile, Choo, Liau, Sim, Li, Fung, & Khoo, 2011). However, despite vigorous opposition towards gaming by the parents and the education system as a whole, gaming is still the […]

Learning Language in the Digital Age: “Edutainment” or…

By Sean & Felix For some of those teachers who have used or even tried to design their own digital “edutainment” programmes in the hope that they can help improve students’ speaking, listening, reading and/or writing skills, their experience might have been rather unsatisfactory, as they would likely end up being frustrated by the low […]

How to Teach Students in Separate “Boxes”?

By  Shirley, Cindy, Lia, Elaine Introduction Online teaching has been a research hotspot because of the pandemic in the past few years. Furthermore, the relation between technology and pedagogy contained in the process of online teaching has also caused concerns. Sankey (2020) believes that teachers should firstly decide teaching approaches and choose appropriate technological tools […]

Facebook! Where I Get My New ID

By Danielle, Kristy, Rose, Sylvia Introduction Each of us might have a different understanding of the relationship between our linguistic identities and individual languages. Some might feel more comfortable using English and identify themselves as English users, others might feel different and consider themselves to be English learners. The availability of digital writing only further […]

Getting started with blogging: Building a learning community

Now is an exciting part of the semester: we’ve gotten off to a good start and are ready to explore the world of new literacies and language learning. As Graham Stanley points out in his book Language Learning with Technology, for online learning to work effectively, it’s important to build the right kind of supportive learning community. A […]

Mobile Learning: Small Devices, Big Issues

By Flora, Coco, Manty, and Olivia   Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2Ly1FOHIa4 Due to the skyrocketing development in IT, learning in the 21st century is not restrained in a fixed geographical location any longer. As the video shows, mobile learning has taken place in and out of the classroom. It is time to embrace mobile learning in our life! […]