ABSTRACT
In Hong Kong, the social and institutional realities in most schools such as large class size, traditional organization culture, exam-oriented mentality of most students, parents, teachers and principals will give rise to belief systems that conflict and compete with some educational philosophies. In the cross-cultural model of classroom interaction, there are mainly two groups of interactants forming the core part of the dialogic events. One is teacher group labelled as the "target language experts" (TLE) and other is the student group as the "target language learners" (TLL). These groups of interactants were characterized by the type of interactive resources they had at their command and the ethnic and social identities they constructed in the macro-sociohistorical context and in the process of interaction. The teacher, assuming the traditional and socially expected role of an expert knowledge possessor and giver, tends to take on a superordinate position in classroom activities where students will normally conform.
