| Summary: | This exploratory study aims to understand, from their own perspectives and in a holistic manner, the personal experiences of three students' living with language and communication difficulties (LCD) from a Cantonese-speaking background in the context of their everyday life in Hong Kong and North America (Le., New York and Toronto). The focus is to through their voices explore the personally meaningful matters and resultant emotional reactions arisen from daily social encounter in their wider sociocultural communication context. How supportive or hostile are these daily living contexts to these individuals and how well do they cope? It was hoped that through this exploration, their views and beliefs would be made known to us and the interplay of their experience and intrapersonal functioning with the sociocultural context would be revealed. More importantly, the intention is that with this knowledge, these students would be more appropriately understood and their needs appropriately responded to. Through observation in and description of the context, analysis of causal explanation and autoethnographic reflection, this study eventually evolved into a critical study, which was evaluative, revelatory in nature. As a result, the issues relating to LCD in cross-cultural encounters in individual's experience milieu were illuminated to disclose new meaning of LCD in a world regulated and dominated by the power of language and culture. It also extended to involve the experience of significant others and helpers (e.g., parents, teachers, professionals). The cross-case analysis of themes emerged out of the findings reveal an enriched discourse of individuals with LCD. It elucidates the interconnectedness and the interplay of language/communication and emotion, the ecological omnipresent system of governmentality and the redemption from it, the social connectedness between them and us, the implications of the presence of individuals with LCD to us.
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