This book reports on an inquiry, conducted in three phases, exploring mainland Chinese students' language learning experiences with a focus on their shifting strategy use prior to and after their arrival in an English-medium university in Hong Kong. The inquiry was motivated by my personal experiences as one of thousands of students moving from the Chinese mainland abroad to pursue tertiary education in English. Like many others, I faced daunting linguistic and academic challenges as a postgraduate student in English-medium universities or study programmes in the United Kingdom, Belgium and Hong Kong. I therefore became interested in understanding the experiences of students like me.

Although I initially intended to find out how mainland Chinese students coped with these challenges in British universities (Gao, 2003, 2006a), my educational experiences in Belgium and Hong Kong have led me to undertake inquiries into another group of Chinese students' language learning experiences (Gao, 2006b, 2008a; Gao et al., 2008). Unlike their counterparts in British, North American or Australian universities, they do their academic studies through the medium of English in multilingual settings, where English may be a less frequently used language. Nevertheless, they still need to develop English competence for their survival and success in the new learning contexts because in these settings English is often a socially important language. In the case of Hong Kong, Cantonese, a regional version of Chinese, functions as the major medium for socialization in daily life and in most social, cultural and political occasions, while English is one of its official languages and widely used in the business and professional sectors. In addition, Putonghua, or Mandarin, the variety of Chinese spoken on the Chinese mainland, is a language of rising importance due to Hong Kong's increasingly economic, socio-cultural and political ties with the mainland since 1997. Thus, Hong Kong presents itself as an interesting setting for an inquiry into learners' strategic learning efforts in order to gain insights into their pursuit of linguistic competence in a multilingual setting.