This article explores how Hong Kong Chinese engineering students with low English language proficiency manage to cope with their lectures given in English. An ethnographic case study approach was used with multiple sources of data triangulated to provide a picture of the lecture event from both the students' and the lecturer's perspectives. One of the outcomes of the study, as described in this article, is that lectures have specific genres and that these genres need to be seen as more than linguistic events. By way of a case study into lecturer behaviour/intention and students' perceptions, lectures can be viewed within the wider, socially constructed context. (Contains 1 table.)