Guangwei Hu

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University | PolyU · Department of English

English language teaching in China has been closely intertwined with her political, ideological, socioeconomic, and cultural upheavals, reflecting and responding to the vicissitudes of national fortunes and successive national agendas. The twists and turns of English language policy have reflected changes in foreign relations, needs of national sur...

This article reports on an experimental study that set out to investigate and compare the effectiveness of a direct and an indirect approach to data-driven learning (DDL) in facilitating Chinese learners’ mastery of a challenging type of lexico-grammatical resource (i.e. hedges) in an undergraduate English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) writing class....

This study explores Chinese English-major students' intertextual competence and factors shaping their ability to paraphrase in academic writing. Multiple instruments were employed to collect data from 212 English-major students at different academic levels from nine universities in mainland China. The data were analyzed to determine how a range of...

This study examines the experiences and motivations of language and linguistics academics who have published in potential predatory journals (PPJs). A questionnaire was administered to 2,793 academics with publications in 63 language and linguistics PPJs, and 213 of them returned their responses. A subsample of the respondents (n = 21) also contrib...

Supervisory feedback plays a key role in thesis writing, especially in L2 contexts. How supervisors perceive the purposes, foci, and challenges of supervisory feedback as well as student engagement can greatly influence how they design and adapt their feedback to foster their students' learning from the writing of a graduate thesis. Surprisingly, l...

Recent discussions on TESOL teacher education have underlined the importance of further research on teacher educators' emotional experiences. In response to this emerging line of research, the present study explored emotion labor (i.e., the clash between internal feelings and external discourses/expectations) and professional identity construction...

Linguistic expressions of interest that signal academic authors' epistemic attitude toward propositional content in their research articles are inherently associated with knowledge-making practices. Drawing on a semantic frame developed for expressions of interest, this study examined how an academic author's geo-academic location and time of publi...

English for specific purposes (ESP) practitioners who are content experts experience different types of critical incident (CI). Although CIs can influence the success or failure of ESP courses and impact on ESP practitioners’ professional lives significantly, they have received only scanty attention in the ESP literature. This study investigates la...

In the past few years livestream teaching has gradually become one of the dominant ways of teaching for foreign language teachers which places higher demands on their data literacy. This paper surveys different conceptualizations and major theories of teacher data literacy and outlines the principal features and potential strengths of livestream fo...

Academic journal publications may be retracted following institutional investigations that confirm allegations of research misconduct. Retraction notices can provide insight into the role institutional investigations play in the decision to retract a publication. Through a content analysis of 7,318 retraction notices published between 1927 and 2019...

Genre studies have tended to focus on academic contexts, with little attention to professional settings. Against this backdrop, this study set out to conduct a corpus-based genre analysis of letters of regularization written to land institutions in Ghana. The study adopted a textual analysis, informed by the ESP approach to genres, and supplemented...

Against the backdrop of English being the academic lingua franca, Chinese medical doctors are under tremendous pressure to get their research published in English-medium journals. This paper reports on a multiple-case study of Chinese medical doctors’ scholarly publishing in English. Drawing on multiple types of data collected from two doctors at a...

• Retraction notices are widely criticized for pervasive opacity and uninformativeness. • Retraction notices as a high-stakes academic genre serve three communicative purposes, namely correcting the literature, deterring potential offence, and repairing the tarnished image. • A comprehensive content inventory of retraction notices is developed...

A key feature of scientific writing is the use of shell noun phrases to turn human experiences into abstract entities. This paper reports on a diachronic study of shell noun phrases in 120 chemical engineering research articles over a span of 40 years, focusing on their lexico-grammatical patterns, functional categories and alternative expressions....

Publication fraud has been on the rise and is posing a serious threat to the integrity and validity of the scientific literature. There is, however, a lack of concerted effort to address the problem. In this letter, I suggest that journal editors' professional networks of communication can be put to good use in a coordinated fight against publicati...

This article presents a comprehensive overview of retraction research. It introduces retraction as a self-correcting mechanism of science involving various stakeholders and a complicated process operating centrally through retraction notices authored by different retraction stakeholders. It presents the main reasons for retraction, discusses the co...

In this editorial we argue that research retraction arising from misconduct and questionable practices should be stigmatized. To support this argument, we define stigmatization as a social process, point to its power in curbing undesirable behaviors, and give the main reasons for our suggestion in contradistinction to some recent popular proposals....

ChatGPT, a chatbot released by OpenAI in November 2022, has rocked academia with its capacity to generate papers "good enough" for academic journals. Major journals such as Nature and professional societies such as the World Association of Medical Editors have moved fast to issue policies to ban or curb AI-written papers. Amid the flurry of policy...

Foreign language textbooks not only aid language learners in developing their linguistic skills and knowledge but also reshape their cultural identities. Drawing on theories of critical curriculum studies, this paper examines cultural representation in two sets of US-produced Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) textbooks for American college learne...

Linguistic expressions of interest as emotive responses are not uncommon in academic discourse but have hardly attracted any research attention. This paper reports on a study designed to examine how the deployment of such expressions in academic writing is mediated by an academic author's disciplinary background and gender. Drawing on a semantic fr...

Although retraction is widely perceived as stigmatic in the scientific community, little is known about how retraction stigma is communicated via retraction notices. Drawing on a dataset of 1,000 retraction notices, this study investigated what communication strategies were employed in retraction notices to construct and manage retraction stigma an...

This study aimed to identify editorial features that can distinguish predatory and legitimate open access journals in the discipline of language and linguistics. Fifty-six journals from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and an equal number of journals from Beall’s updated list of potential predatory journals (PPJs) were selected for a cl...

While academic writing is traditionally expected to be objective, linguistically expressed surprise, interest, and confusion indexing authors' affective attitudes toward their propositions are not uncommon in research articles. These emotions , collectively known as knowledge emotions, are inherently cognitive and can contribute to the construction...

Long characterized as a primary form of academic misconduct and a major threat to academic integrity, the issue of plagiarism has been extensively researched from multiple perspectives, including students’ and academic staff’s perceptions and attitudes concerning plagiarism, measures for detecting and deterring plagiarism and their effectiveness, a...

The Asia-Pacific region has seen an exponential growth of English-medium instruction (EMI) over the past two decades or so. In response to the rapid spread of EMI, there is increased research attention to this form of pedagogy. This chapter seeks to explore the trends and foci of research on EMI in the Asia Pacific and offer useful implications for...

This special issue sets out to review and provide new insights into the bilingual and multilingual education policy in the Greater Bay Area of China (GBA, including Hong Kong, Macau, and Guangdong) in the light of the emerging translanguaging theory (Li Wei, 2018 & 2021; Li & Shen, 2021; Li & Kelly-Holmes, 2022). Specifically, it will apply the tra...

This special issue (Asian Pacific Journal of Foreign and Second Language Education, 2022) sets out to revisit major bilingual and multilingual education policy and planning issues in key cities across the dynamic Greater Bay Area (GBA) of China (including Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macau), as informed by the emerging insights from translanguaging th...

This study examined editorial differences between potential predatory and mainstream journals in the discipline of language and linguistics. A keyword search of the relevant journals on Beall's updated list of potential predatory journals led to a sample of 66 journals. An equal number of journals were selected from those indexed by Web of Science...

The Zhuang language test (Vahcuengh Sawcuengh Suijbingz Gaujsi, VSSG) is the first minority language test in the People's Republic of China. It was designed with multiple goals including improving Zhuang language teaching, recruiting students for relevant majors of tertiary study, identifying proficiency for work-related applications, and piloting...

Extant research has highlighted the essentiality of grammatical metaphor (GM) as a linguistic resource in academic writing. Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this study investigated the relationship between explicit instruction in nominalisation as one type of GM and ESL learners' mastery of this key resource. Adopting a true experi...

This study aimed to identify editorial features that can distinguish predatory and legitimate open-access journals in the discipline of language and linguistics. Fifty-six journals from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and an equal number of journals from Beall’s updated list of potential predatory journals (PPJs) were identified and se...

While increasing efforts have been made to teach English prepositions to EFL learners from a Cognitive Linguistics (CL) perspective, the bulk of the extant research has focused on adult learners at the advanced English proficiency level and reported only quantitative results. Limited attention has been paid to elementary learners, and there has bee...

This introductory chapter maps out the field of research on cultural knowledge and values by focusing on three main themes, i.e., representation, multimodality, and stakeholders. It first overviews the relevant research literature on the representation of cultural content in English language teaching (ELT) materials with regard to theoretical ratio...

The inculcation of social, cultural, and moral values in English language teaching (ELT) has received growing scholarly attention (Hall, 2010; Johnston, 2003; Lee, 2014; Rascón-Moreno, 2014; Widodo et al., 2018) since ELT is becoming increasingly global. Combining theoretical insights into value and morality in ELT (Johnston, 2003), evaluation in l...

Extant scholarship on citation has examined a limited number of citational features, adopted disciplinary and ethnolinguistic perspectives disjunctively, and paid little systematic attention to the nature of cited sources. Drawing on appraisal theory, the present study investigated the nature of cited sources, namely personalization (i.e., whether...

Retraction notices are expected to be transparent about entities accountable for retractions and their reasons for retraction. No previous research on retraction notices has investigated accountable entities other than authors of retracted publications and their reasons for retraction from a cross-disciplinary and a diachronic perspective. Drawing...

Retraction of published research is laudable as a post-publication self-correction of science but undesirable as an indicator of grave violations of research and publication ethics. Given its various adverse consequences, retraction has a stigmatizing effect both in and beyond the academic community. However, little theoretical attention has been p...

The promotion of standard languages as mediums of instruction as well as the worldwide spread and popularity of English have generated various issues related to attitudes towards and ideologies underpinning different languages, language practices, and language teaching and learning in different contexts. With the promotion of the English-as-a-Mediu...

The global spread of private tutoring of English (PTE) has become a driving force of the global marketisation of English. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, this study explores how tutors in the PTE sector, an under-researched group of teachers, construct their professional identities in the market-oriented educational, institutional, and soci...

Taking appropriate stance is crucial for successful academic writing. Experienced academic writers have been found to use various metadiscoursal resources skilfully to signal their authorial stance in line with prevalent disciplinary and paradigmatic knowledge-making practices. Little research, however, has examined how disciplines and research par...

This paper is a case study evaluating the concerns that middle leaders in Singapore schools had as they implemented a large-scale English language curriculum reform. Drawing on in-depth interviews, the study aimed to gain insights into middle leaders' perspectives. Its findings indicated that middle leadership could exert a substantial influence on...

This paper takes a look at English medium instruction (EMI) in Chinese higher education, offers comments on the five articles included in this special issue, identifies challenges and conundrums in EMI, and invites further research on the processes and products of EMI in the Chinese context.

This study investigates factors that influence pedagogical conceptual change in a group of 49 English teachers in Hong Kong. The data comprised the teachers' responses to a drama-as-pedagogy questionnaire, their written reflections and two teachers' interviews on issues in implementing a drama-based pedagogy in English lessons. The findings suggest...

The written thesis is the climax of a master’s degree with a thesis component, and supervision is at its core. Extant research, thin on the ground, has underscored the paramount role of supervisors in the success or failure of their students’ thesis projects. Despite the rising numbers of students writing a master’s thesis, master’s thesis supervis...

Although much has been written about Chinese students’ understandings of illegitimate intertextual practices, few studies have investigated Chinese university teachers’ perceptions of plagiarism, let alone the effects of their disciplinary background on their knowledge of and attitudes toward plagiarism. This paper reports on a study that examined...

While there has been much research detailing how English as a foreign language (EFL) students attending English for academic purposes (EAP) courses struggle with a wide array of challenges when adjusting to university English-medium instruction, how these students use feedback to self-regulate their academic English learning and what contributes to...

Previous research has found authors of retracted publications responsible for the vast majority of retractions. Although considerable research attention has been given to reasons for retraction, few studies have examined author-related reasons from a cross-disciplinary and a severity-based perspective. Drawing on data from the Web of Science Core C...

Students' perceptions of supervisory feedback can have a profound impact on their engagement with and agency in learning. Understanding students' perceptions is vital to tailoring feedback to their needs. However, little is known about student perceptions of supervisory feedback on master's theses. To address this lacuna, the present study collecte...

Supervisory feedback on thesis drafts and presentations is arguably the most important source of information for graduate students, particularly those writing their theses in English-as-a-foreign-language contexts, to conduct, complete, report and improve graduate research and benefit from the process. Despite its critical role in scaffolding stude...

The ever-intensifying globalization in the last few decades has seen new communities of English learners/users, diverse contexts of English learning, and multivarious functions of English use. These fundamental changes have posed challenges for language assessment in Global Englishes. This chapter reviews extant responses to the challenges and disc...

This paper reports on a mixed-methods study that utilized a convergent parallel design to examine Chinese graduate students' knowledge of and stance on plagiarism in English academic writing. A sample of 183 master's students from three broad disciplinary groupings at a major university in northeastern China completed a Perceptions of Plagiarism (P...

Research on supervisory feedback on master’s theses, especially attitudinal stances conveyed in such feedback, is thin on the ground. Students’ construal of their supervisors’ attitudes, however, can have a profound impact on their engagement with supervisory feedback. Drawing on the appraisal framework, which characterizes attitudinal meanings in...

This paper reports on a corpus-based study of linguistic expressions of surprise (i.e., a type of attitude markers functioning as metadiscourse) in 160 applied linguistics research articles that were published in two periods of time separated by 30 years. Unlike previous research on metadiscourse, this study took a frame semantics perspective on su...

Leveraging state-of-the-art scientometric and analytical techniques, this paper provides a diachronic, quantitative, systematic overview of English-for-specific-purposes (ESP) research, as represented by the publications cited in two flagship journals of the field from 1980 to 2018. A co-citation analysis of 1092 main articles and their 25,147 uniq...

Informed by image repair theory, this study examines grammatical resources used to represent agents of retraction-engendering acts in retraction notices (RNs). A corpus of 250 RNs from two broad disciplinary groupings and authored by different stakeholders was analyzed to determine if agents of retraction-engendering acts were identified and how li...

This study examined the within- and cross-language metalinguistic contribution of three components of metalinguistic awareness (i.e., phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and syntactic awareness) to reading comprehension in monolingual Chinese-speaking children from Mainland China ( n = 190) and English–Chinese bilingual children from S...

Taking a cognitive approach to genre-specific language, this corpus-based study investigated the disciplinary and paradigmatic effect on the use of a specific type of attitude markers—surprise markers—with an analytical framework informed by frame semantics. A Surprise frame was generated and then used to analyze the use of surprise markers in a 2,...

Previous research on plagiarism has increased awareness and knowledge of the various aspects of this issue, such as contributing factors to plagiarism, students’ and teachers’ perceptions of plagiarism, and institutional policies and regulations on plagiarism. Yet much of this research, especially on the latter two aspects, has been conducted in An...

This paper starts by outlining, in broad terms, the relationship between disciplinary knowledge-making and academic discourse, discussing how dominant knowledge-knower structures found in different disciplines may shape the rhetorical and discourse strategies used by members of these disciplines in academic communication. It then reviews, in consid...

Educational neoliberalism has swept the world, and Singapore, with its much-lauded educational system, has not been spared. In fact, it has taken a stranglehold on the system, from its policymakers at the helm to its teachers at the chalkface. The embrace of neoliberal ideas has pervaded Singapore’s short educational history, from its colonial time...

Although academic discourse has a reputation for its emotionless objectivity, the emotion of surprise is often expressed in scientific writing. Paradoxically, surprise is cognitive in nature and recognized as a knowledge emotion. Given the connection between surprise and knowledge-making, it is surprising that linguistic expressions of surprise (i....

The last few decades have seen escalating national and institutional efforts to internationalize higher education around the globe. One current, popular strategy is to provide English-medium instruction (EMI) in educational contexts where English is a foreign language. As a curricular strategy intended to internationalize tertiary institutions and...

This article provides a perspective on the history of teacher education in Singapore. It starts with a summary listing of the educational milestones Singapore has achieved in international benchmark studies to provide a context and backdrop with which to view the quality of Singapore's teachers and teaching. This is followed by a historical survey...

In this article, the construction of a test previously used successfully with dyslexic children and low achievers to assess performance is formally evaluated. An English Exam Skills Programme (EESP) was developed and implemented in 2013 with the goal of helping primary school students with dyslexia develop their English Language skills and achieve...

The ever-intensifying globalization and marketization of higher education are placing increased pressure on doctoral students to publish during candidature. This paper reports a study of Chinese nursing doctoral students' endeavors to publish in English. Drawing on Activity Theory, the study employed a multiple-case study design and collected multi...

This study investigated the concurrent contributions of three components of metalinguistic awareness (i.e., phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and syntactic awareness) to the writing competence of primary three English–Chinese bilingual children in Singapore (n = 390) and monolingual Chinese-speaking children in Mainland China (n = 19...

This paper reports on a cross-disciplinary study of the effects of instructional medium and disciplinary background on teacher questions and student responses in 20 subject classes at a Chinese university. These classes were sampled to operationalize the distinction between hard and soft disciplines based on the hypothesis that these two disciplina...

The use of attitude markers in research articles (RAs) has been extensively researched. However, though it has been acknowledged that in RAs attitudes tend to be expressed towards novel or unexpected scientific facts (Hu & Cao, 2015, p. 22; Hyland & Jiang, 2017, p. 19), the use of surprise markers in RAs has not received sufficient scholarly attent...

STELLAR® is a national curricular approach to teaching the English language that is currently implemented in primary schools across Singapore. This entry describes the literacy program's two distinct dimensions: its essence as reflected in the teaching strategies and materials, and the structured implementation supports that have been put in place....

As a response to intensified globalization, international research collaboration has become common in the social sciences. This paper reports a study that examined what Chinese management academics and their overseas counterparts perceived to be the benefits and challenges arising from research collaboration with each other. Data collected with two...

Unlike other academic publications whose authorship is eagerly claimed, the provenance of retraction notices (RNs) is often obscured presumably because the retraction of published research is associated with undesirable behavior and consequently carries negative consequences for the individuals involved. The ambiguity of authorship, however, has se...

Teachers’ instructional practices surrounding written assignments have been little researched, despite writing remaining the primary means of assessment in higher education, including postgraduate professional development programmes. In this paper, we report a study that explored what a sample of lecturers in a Master of Education programme at an E...

This chapter begins by illustrating the types of obstacles that college-age Chinese learners of English face when listening to spoken English, which typically include both lower and higher level problems. Drawing on the literature and teacher interviews, this chapter moves on to discuss pedagogic strategies taken by Chinese college English teachers...

Automated writing evaluation (AWE) systems can provide immediate computer-generated quantitative assessments and qualitative diagnostic feedback on an enormous number of submitted essays. However, limited research attention has been paid to locally designed AWE systems used in English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom contexts. This study explo...

Retraction notices appear regularly in many scholarly journals, especially top-tier journals of science and engineering. One disconcerting feature of this emergent genre is evasion of authorship, that is, the deliberate obscuring of who has authored a particular retraction notice. This communication illustrates and discusses problems of evaded auth...

In this paper we report a study which was aimed to find out how overseas-trained Chinese management academics (CMAs) compare with their home-trained counterparts in English-medium scholarly experience. Our data were drawn from a web-based questionnaire distributed following the conclusion of the biennial conference of the International Association...

Little research has been conducted on writing-related issues in Master's level postgraduate professional development (PPD) programs. In such contexts lecturers' responses to student writing make a particularly worthwhile subject of research, as they reveal assumptions about valid knowledge surrounding the relationship between academia and the profe...

Informed by Vygotsky’s conceptualization of the Zone of Proximal Development, this case study investigated the benefits of peer feedback on second language (L2) writing for students with high L2 proficiency and the factors that may influence their learning in peer feedback in the Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language context. Specifically, the stud...

Despite its prominence in applied linguistics and the many valuable insights into language teaching and learning it has contributed, second language learner strategy research as a line of scientific inquiry is confronted with a range of conceptual and methodological challenges and questions regarding the subject matter for research proper. At no ot...

Plagiarism has engendered increasing concern in academia in the past few decades. While previous studies have investigated student plagiarism from various perspectives, how plagiarism is understood and responded to by university teachers, especially those in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) writing contexts, has been under-researched. As academi...