Guangwei Hu

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University | PolyU · Department of English and Communication

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...

Despite its prominence and functionality in academic writing, cohesion is under-researched in academic genres, including research articles (RAs). Moreover, there is little cross-disciplinary research on cohesion in academic discourse. Thus, this study aimed to investigate cohesion in the discussion section of RAs at sentence, paragraph and text lev...

This study adopted a mixed-methods design to examine how feedback givers’/receivers’ affective, behavioral and cognitive engagement with peer feedback were related to each other. One hundred and twenty-four English-major sophomores, purposively sampled based on their English proficiency and willingness to participate, responded to questionnaires ad...

This paper reports on an empirical investigation into the effects of three motivational interventions on Chinese junior secondary EFL students' L2 motivational self system (L2MSS: ideal L2 self, ought-to L2 self, and L2 learning experience). The study employed a quasi-experimental design with pre-post-delayed questionnaire surveys involving four gr...

Language is one of the critical factors in various aspects of life and, therefore, provides a vantage point through which to examine social justice issues. Education is home to various intersections of language and social justice because all forms of education are mediated through languages, which determine learners' participation in educational ac...

Informed by self-determination theory, this study investigates the motivations behind students' voluntary pursuit of a master's thesis and the crucial role of supervisory support in their academic journey. The study also explores the impact of writing a master's thesis on their growth and well-being. Data were collected through interviews with 20 s...

This Element aims to provide a comprehensive and in-depth exploration of the issue of plagiarism in second language writing. It first outlines the importance of plagiarism as a real-world issue cutting across educational and cultural contexts and touches upon several prominent controversies over the issue. Then the Element defines and conceptualise...

Retraction, as a post-publication quality control measure increasingly adopted by mainstream journals, has been observed in a few potential predatory journals (PPJs), but the extent and handling of retractions by PPJs in general remain unclear. This study investigated retraction practices among the 1,511 standalone PPJs on the updated Beall's List....

This study aimed to explore English language teachers' vulnerability and identity negotiation in relation to self-branding on social media. It focused on 15 Iranian teachers' experiences in teaching and self-promotion on Instagram through narrative frames and follow-up interviews. The analysis of the teacher narratives demonstrated that the new onl...

This study longitudinally tracked how a CoP focused on sharing emotional vulnerabilities contributed to three novice language teachers’ agencies across the three dimensions of belonging (engagement, imagination, and alignment). Multi-stage analyses of data sources (interviews, reflective journals, observations, and online interactions) revealed tha...

Drawing upon the theoretical framework of learning and identity work through boundary crossing, this study examined how Chinese university English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) teachers negotiated their researcher-teacher identities through attending professional doctoral programs in education and applied linguistics. Adopting a case study design, da...

Questions asked by teachers are vital to maintaining and sustaining learner engagement. In Hong Kong secondary classrooms where English is used as the medium of instruction (EMI), productive teacher questioning is key to promoting both language and content learning. Drawing on classroom observations and in-depth interviews, this study investigated...

Linguistic expressions of surprise (i.e., surprise markers) are epistemically motivated and inherently connected to knowledge construction. Taking a frame semantic approach, this study examined how surprise markers were used by academic writers to disseminate knowledge in research articles. Based on a self-built corpus of 640 journal articles total...

English for Academic Purposes (EAP) focuses on equipping learners with the English language skills necessary for academic success. Since its emergence in the early 1970s, EAP has grown significantly, adapting to the changing demands of globalization and the rise of English as the lingua franca of academia. This chapter outlines the history, shaping...

This study examines researchers' ethical concerns toward the deployment of GenAI in research and their emotional responses. To acquire an in-depth understanding, we used narrative frames and follow-up interviews to collect data from 22 researchers who reported extensive experience with GenAI. An inductive thematic analysis revealed three themes cap...

Despite the emerging attempts to integrate identity work into teacher education programs, how identity can be incorporated into professional development of in-service teachers is still an open question. This study reports on a professional development program on productive teacher questioning that was offered to secondary school English teachers in...

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...

The global spread of EMI is a response to the internationalisation and marketisation of higher education. However, students may not fully benefit from EMI programmes if they are not adequately prepared. The extent to which students have been prepared to succeed in such programmes and acquire English as linguistic capital is an underexplored area. T...

Through the lens of identity, this study explored the lived experiences of two Chinese university English-as-a-foreign-language teachers who were doing a professional doctorate for professional development. Adopting a narrative case study design and informed by activity theory, the study drew on a rich dataset comprising narrative frames, interview...

This chapter offers a comprehensive examination of the rhetorical, linguistic, and multimodal features of popular science communication. It reviews existing literature on prevalent written and spoken popular science genres. The findings indicate that authors of popular science genres employ a diverse range of recontextualization and reformulation s...

Informed by basic psychological needs theory, this multi-case study explored four supervisors' feedback practices and their effects on Chinese English-major students' engagement with feedback on their undergraduate dissertations written in English. Data comprised interviews with students and supervisors, stimulated recalls with students, audio reco...

This multiple case study explores how and to what extent Chinese English-major students engage affectively, behaviorally, and cognitively with supervisory feedback on their English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) undergraduate theses, as well as how motivation and second language (L2) proficiency may mediate their engagement. Data were collected from t...

Internationally operating professionals in China study business English to develop their language proficiency and transcultural communicative competence. While a variety of business English textbooks are on the market and are used in China, their conceptualizations of culture tend to be nation-based, static, and predictable – views of culture that...

Linguistic expressions of confusion (e.g., perplexing, puzzling, confusing) are important lexico-grammatical resources for academic authors to construct knowledge, enhance persuasion, and promote their research. Drawing on a frame-semantic approach, this paper examined whether the deployment of such expressions differed between male and female acad...

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...

The Retraction Watch Database (RWDB) is widely used to retrieve retraction data. However, its lack of affiliation normalization hinders the retrieval efficiency of retraction data for specific research-performing organizations. A query for a university name in the RWDB may yield retraction data entries for other universities with similar names, giv...

Despite the growth of research on language teachers' emotion and professional identity in the past decades, little is known about the emotional life of language teacher educators (LTEs), much less about their emotional vulnerability. Accordingly, the present study drew on activity theory and explored 14 Iranian LTEs' emotional vulnerability and pro...

Despite the recent growth of research on language teacher educators’ (LTEs) professionalism, little research is available on their agency. In response to this gap of knowledge, this study drew on an ecological theoretical framework and explored the agency and identity construction of Iranian LTEs. Grounded in a narrative inquiry methodology, data w...

Engaging students in the second language (L2) classroom is important, but sustaining and promoting L2 learner classroom engagement over time is even more crucial for the long-term acquisition of the target language. This study contributes to the L2 engagement literature by tracking L2 learner classroom engagement over the course of a semester and i...

English medium instruction (EMI) as a language policy in higher education is based on monolingual conceptions and limits the use of the full linguistic repertoire of bilinguals/multilinguals in the university classroom. Informed by the constructs of language ideology (Spolsky, Bernard. 2009. Language management. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University...

The perennial problem of author name ambiguity has attracted increasing attention in the academic community. Drawing on the literature, this article first highlights the pervasiveness of the problem and discusses its adverse consequences. It then analyzes the behavioral causes of the problem in the Chinese context and attributes them to personal, c...

Student engagement has attracted much research attention in higher education because of various potential benefits associated with improved engagement. Despite extensive research on student engagement in higher education, little has been written about graduate students’ engagement with supervisory feedback. This paper reports on a study on student...

本文透过评价韵律现象审视评价意义的语篇语义建构原理，从内涵与实证两个角度梳理概念的起源和演进、与语篇组织的关系、语篇过程属性以及在劝说语类中的应用。评价韵律是人际意义语篇布局的一种动态机制，属于评价语篇组织的下位概念，基于相互依存性与重复性语义关系建构语篇过程。评价语篇组织研究存在术语混用的问题，建议准确理解概念意涵并定位研究视角，规范术语使用。

Supervision lies at the heart of research-based doctoral education. Existing scholarship has recognized the role of supervision in students’ academic socialization and identity construction but presented little empirical evidence based on prolonged observations of actual supervisory interactions. Addressing this gap, the present study adopted a dig...

Second language (L2) motivation has been widely discussed as a determinant of success or failure in L2 learning. L2 teachers, especially those of junior secondary students (aged between 13 and 15 years), can play a critical role by deploying effective motivational strategies (MSs) to enhance and sustain their students' L2 motivation. Previous studi...

A key manifestation of market forces permeating higher education is the marketised discourse in universities’ vision and mission statements, promoting institutional brands and offerings. This study set out to explore how 59 Ghanaian universities marketise themselves in their vision and mission statements. Drawing on critical discourse analysis (CDA...

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...

Beliefs about oral corrective feedback, especially those held by young EFL learners, are under-researched. This paper reports on a study designed to investigate whether Chinese junior secondary students and teachers share similar beliefs about oral corrective feedback (OCF) in English instruction and how students’ English proficiency may relate to...

Scientometric methods have increasingly been used to provide historical as well as state-of-the-art accounts of research in various disciplines, including applied linguistics. To provide an updated overview of the research trends in applied linguistics, we analyzed 7602 articles with over 198,000 unique references published between 2017 and 2021 in...

The ethics of the proofreading of English-as-an-additional-language (EAL) scholars’ academic writing for publication is an under-explored topic. This chapter addresses this topic by examining how various proofreaders intervened and shaped two manuscripts written by a master’s student of biology in China. A review of the relevant literature reveals...

Linguistic expressions of confusion, namely confusion markers, construe discrepancies between an academic author’s prior knowledge and the information received. These emotive responses motivate knowledge-seeking behaviors to dissolve cognitive incongruities and are inherently connected with knowledge-making. Limited research has, however, examined...

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.

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...

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...

Key points 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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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 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...

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...