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The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted traditional approaches to education and forced educators to adopt and adapt technologies to allow institutions to remain open, offer courses and other services to enable students to continue their education. This rapid shift to online teaching and learning has shone a light on the need for institutions to support students in working out how to maintain autonomy through meaningful interaction in the online world. In this paper we discuss the transition of a face-to-face university writing center to a synchronous online writing center that is hosted in the videoconferencing application Zoom. In doing this we explain the rationale that informed our thinking throughout the transition process and how sound pedagogical principles and a focus on the student experience guided our decision-making. Preliminary findings regarding how self-regulated learning was maintained and nurtured in the virtual writing center are presented and discussed.

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This article discusses the effects of Hong Kong’s language policy changes in education since China reclaimed the territory in 1997. It describes Hong Kongers’ perceptions of English and their mother tongue Cantonese, and considers the effects of the Cantonese medium of instruction (CMI) policy, which was introduced to promote biliteracy and trilingualism1 among Hong Kongers. The analysis shows that even though CMI results in deeper learning in Hong Kong students, the strength and status of English as the lingua franca in the territory remains strong, and access to the linguistic capital English brings remains restricted to those with financial capital to afford it.

This chapter presents a multi-method qualitative study of an active blended learning (ABL) activity in an undergraduate English for academic purposes program at a North American university. The purpose of the study was to understand how instructors facilitated ABL in five online book clubs. The community of inquiry (CoI) framework is used to analyze the comments and posts in the book clubs. This data is discussed with data from interviews with three case study students and four book club instructors and data from a CoI student survey. The findings indicate that instructor book selection, questions, scaffolding strategies, modelling, and manner significantly mediated student perceptions regarding their engagement, participation, and interaction in the ABL activity, specifically whether students scaffolded each other's learning, read extensively, and practised academic reading strategies. Implications of how instructor pedagogy mediated student perceptions about their participation and learning in the ABL activity are then presented.