RELC Journal

This paper focuses on an evaluative, ethnographic case study of an English language and cultural immersion programme for Hong Kong university students. Prior to a five-week sojourn in England, the 15 English majors completed a survey and interview to determine their expectations and concerns. While in Oxford, they took courses in an English Language Centre, investigated a cultural scene of their choice, visited cultural/literary sites, took part in informal activities with international students, and lived with a British family. They reflected on their experiences across cultures, including stressful or confusing encounters, in a diary. During the sojourn, the researcher (their ethnography teacher) observed, photographed, and recorded their behavior in field notes and gathered additional information by way of informal discussions. Post-sojourn, the students filled in a questionnaire and offered their perceptions about their experiences in interviews and a series of debriefing sessions. The analysis of the triangulated data helped to understand the sojourn better from the students’ perspectives and suggested speci-fic issues that should be addressed in future pre-departure intercultural communications seminars. The paper aims to illustrate the valuable role that ethnographic research can play in programme evaluation and enhancement.

This study reports on collaboration between second language (L2) instructors of English and Japanese. Learners and speakers of each language were brought together on a regular basis to serve as models, partners, group members, and supportive peers to assist each other’s language learning efforts. ANOVA analyses were used to contrast students in the programme with others in regular classes on reported frequency of L2 use beyond the instructional setting, friendship patterns maintained within the first language (L1) and L2, three aspects of motivation for second language acquisition, and attitudes held toward culturally different others (ATCD). Significant differences were found between students inside and outside the programme on four of the variables analyzed. Multiple regressions were then used to assess the impact of six predictor variables (L1-USE, first L1-FR and L2-FR language friendship patterns, two aspects of SLA motivation, and ATCD) on reported levels of L2 use outside of the classroom. Four of the predictors were found to be significant to the equation, which accounted for approximately 28% of the variance in L2 use. The findings suggest regular immersion in an authentic L2 environment created within an instructional setting may assist learners in developing stronger motivation to use a L2, augment tendencies toward friendships between learners and members of a L2 speech community, and assist in development of more positive attitudes toward culturally different others.

Presently, the importance of culture and context is becoming a significant feature of research in the field of learning strategies. To date, there has been little research into learning strategies utilized for reading and writing in Asian EAP (English for Academic Purposes) contexts, and in particular in the Thai context. With this in mind, this research investigated learning strategies employed by undergraduate students at a Thai university studying EAP reading and writing courses. The research aimed to identify the most frequently used strategies and different strategy use between ‘successful’ and ‘less successful’ learners. Learning strategies were classified following Oxford’s (1990) six category taxonomy and an additional category of negative strategies. The results revealed metacognitive, cognitive and compensation as the most frequently used strategies overall. Differences in strategy use for successful and less successful readers and writers were also demonstrated. A number of affective and social strategies were identified in the quantitative analysis which needed further investigation. Furthermore, various strategies investigated in earlier learner strategy research seemed, based on this research, to be culturally inappropriate in the Thai context.

Reading and understanding a text presents a variety of processing problems for L2 learners. The organizational pattern of a text has been considered by some researchers to have an important influence in this process. This article describes an experimental study of a group of Hong Kong schoolchildren and presents evidence that learners reading in English as a second language experience unexpected comprehension problems that may be related to L1-L2 rhetorical differences. Results indicate predilections which favour particular rhetorical patterns: it is suggested that specific teaching strategies should be employed to raise reader awareness of this aspect of comprehension.

This paper re-visits, in the light of a recent survey in Hong Kong, issues in relation to how people are represented in educational materials for language-learners. Consideration is given to stereotyping in the way men and women are depicted and broader questions concerning the ‘visibility’ of women, the divorced and other groups, and the possible effects of such representation on school-age learners.

English has been an important language of education in Brunei since the inception of public education there but, as is often the case when a language becomes a second language within a country, it is taking on some unique local characteristics, despite official condemnation of such developments. Can the desired balance of roles between English and Malay be maintained without either language unduly influencing the other? And what of the roles of the local versus international varieties of English? These and other questions about English in Brunei will be explored in this article.