This article examines colonial language policies and practices at the government Central School, Hong Kong - the so-called Eton of the East - in the second half of the nineteenth century. The article, which draws on a range of unpublished primary sources, seeks to enhance our knowledge of an important episode in Hong Kong's educational history and, in so doing, illuminate our understanding of British attitudes towards the learning and use of English in the empire. The article is divided into three main sections. The first section analyses the nature and purposes of the scheme to 'centralise' government-sponsored English teaching in a flagship school in the early 1860s. The second section investigates the roles of the English and Chinese languages in the colonial curriculum and the approaches to the teaching of English adopted by the school's founding Headmaster, Frederick Stewart. The final section examines the reform of the Central School in the late nineteenth century.
[Copyright of Language and Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/le744.0]

This article examines the attitudes of the colonial and metropolitan governments towards the promotion of English-language education on Hong Kong Island between 1842 and 1860. The study, which draws on a range of unpublished primary sources, was conducted in response to Whitehead's recent call for detailed case studies of colonial education policies. This article explores, within the context of Hong Kong, a centrally important aspect of education in the Empire, and one that has been the subject of surprisingly little archival research: British policies towards the teaching and learning of English as a second language. The article begins by analysing the political, economic and demographic forces that influenced the study and use of English in Hong Kong during the 1840s and 1850s, and then moves on to examine language policies and practices in the colony's mission schools, with a particular focus on the Morrison Education Society School, the first Western school to be established on the Island after the British occupation. The final section analyses the introduction of English teaching in the government vernacular schools in the early 1850s.
[Copyright of History of Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00467600600745395]

This study aims to report how Hong Kong teachers handle a seemingly conventional, orderly schooling phenomenonXthe teaching of the newly arrived children (NAC) migrated from mainland China. Semi-structured interviews with ten teachers from nine primary schools were conducted. The principal findings are that the teachers are not prepared for the challenges of teaching NAC, that the traditional approaches adopted by many teachers are ineffective, that subtle transformation of the pupil population due to the everlasting influx of NAC has yet to be appreciated by the teachers, and that teachers' logic - their worldview, mindset and conceptualisation of forces at work in Hong Kong schooling - remains unchanged. This paper highlights the various issues of monoculturalisation. Implications are discussed.
[Copyright of Teaching Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10476210500122691]

The study on which this article is based examined the gender differences in educational achievements based on a longitudinal sample of more than 45,000 secondary school students in Hong Kong who took a public examination in 1997. The results coincided with the findings from recent British studies that boys did less well than girls in all areas of the school curriculum. The multilevel analyses of the effects of schooling, after controlling for initial ability, indicated that schooling did have an effect on gender differences. Girls achieved better results studying in single-sex schools whereas boys achieved better in co-educational schools. Compared with other students, it was those boys studying in the arts stream that did the least well in the public examination. The results are discussed in the context of the methodology of investigating gender differences and of the substantive questions of school effectiveness.
[Copyright of British Educational Research Journal is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0141192022000019080]

The paper focuses on the development of teacher thinking, specifically L2 teachers' subject-matter cognitions, i.e. their Teacher Language Awareness (TLA) (see e.g. Andrews 2001, 2003). The study examines the evolving TLA, as it relates to grammar, of three teachers, each a graduate with more than 10 years' experience of teaching English in Hong Kong secondary schools. All three teachers took part in a previous TLA study conducted in 1996-97 (see Andrews, 1999a), when they were in their early years of teaching and had received no professional training. In the present study, these three teachers' TLA and cognitions about grammar were investigated once more (in 2004). The aim of this follow-up study was to tell the story of each teacher's evolving TLA and grammar-related cognitions. In both phases of the research a mixed methods approach was adopted. Data from the two studies suggested that the teachers' TLA and grammar-related cognitions had altered very little. Their underlying beliefs about grammar pedagogy and the role of explicit grammar teaching, and their knowledge about grammar (as measured by a test of LA) seemed largely unchanged. The main difference between the three teachers was in their interaction with the context in which they worked.
[Copyright of Language Awareness is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658410608668846 ]

The use of students' second language as the medium of instruction in schools is quite common in former colonies of Western countries. Schools in Hong Kong have had this kind of experience for more than 150 years. In this study, three factors, namely economic, political, and educational, are found to affect the choice of medium of instruction in schools. In particular, the economic factor is found to be the dominant one for most of the time, while the educational factor has the smallest influence. Due to the change of the above three factors and their interactions over time, there were more Chinese-medium secondary schools in the first 100 years (1842-1949) and then more English-medium secondary schools during the transitional period 1950-97. However, the political factor suddenly becomes dominant after the change of sovereignty--there is an abrupt drop in English-medium secondary schools after government intervention in 1998. Educators should be more vocal and involved in politics in order to push the Government to make decisions that are educationally right.
[Copyright of Language and Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500780408666891]