Chapter 3 has established the broad contextual conditions for the participants' language learning on the Chinese mainland and in Hong Kong. This chapter now reports on findings from the study in Phase 1, in which newly arrived mainland Chinese undergraduates were interviewed in August and September 2004 about their experiences of learning English and their strategy use on the Chinese mainland. This helped establish a baseline for comparison when the same participants were interviewed again about their language learning experiences in Hong Kong (see Chapter 5).

Study in Phase 1 (August–September 2004)

The primary aim in the first research phase was to capture the developmental process of the research participants' strategy use through interpreting their learning experiences on the Chinese mainland. It aimed to answer the following research questions:

• (1) What were the distinctive features of the participants' strategy use on the Chinese mainland?

• (2) How did these participants come to adopt particular patterns of strategy use as displayed in their interview accounts?

With the insights from my previous research (Gao, 2003, 2006a) and the adoption of the sociocultural perspective outlined in Chapter 2 (Figure 2.5), I also found it necessary to include the following research questions in Phase 1:

• (1) How did the participants construct their language learning discursively in terms of motivation (motives or values) and beliefs on the Chinese mainland?

• (2) How did social agents mediate their strategy use?

• (3) What were the roles of cultural artefacts in their development of particular learning strategies?

In this phase, 22 arriving mainland Chinese undergraduates, who attended a non-compulsory summer English course at the university, volunteered for the study and were interviewed, using a semi-structured interview guide (Appendix 1). Fifteen of them were interviewed again in the third phase about their language learning experiences in Hong Kong approximately 20 months later (Table 4.1). As can be seen in Table 4.1, most of them were studying courses like business as these courses were highly popular among mainland Chinese applicants.