Both Japan and Hong Kong seek to enhance the English standard of their secondary school students by implementing a native-speaking English teachers scheme, named the JET (Japan Exchange and Teaching) Programme in Japan and the NET (Native-speaking English Teachers) Scheme in Hong Kong. However, the implications of these programmes seem to be sociopolitical more than educational. As for Japan, JET is a consequence of an explicit political strategy to promote international relationships. The Japanese Government is keen to bring up a generation that is able to understand other countries yet retain Japanese national consciousness. On the surface, the Hong Kong NET Scheme seems to be a more straightforward language improvement programme. However, the Japanese experience suggests another level of analysis. The Hong Kong Government is never as explicit as Japan as to what it wants to achieve through the NET Scheme. Though NET is claimed to be a language improvement scheme, there is no evidence to show how effectively this kind of programme can work in local Hong Kong secondary schools. With a special interest in the ideologies behind the two language improvement programmes, this paper attempts to explore their sociopolitical and cultural meanings beyond their educational surface.
[Copyright of Language, Culture and Curriculum is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07908319908666579]

Using multivariate discriminant analysis and the data from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 1999, this paper made 5 individual comparisons between the U.S. middle school system and 5 Asian middle school systems, which have typically been top ranked in mathematics and science achievement scores. The discriminant analysis was based on variables related to school and classroom environment as well as students' out-of-school life, home background, and self-perceptions about mathematics and science. The results reveal significant differences between American schools and their Asian counterparts. The author explains these differences in terms of the societal difference in the position of schooling in the lives of American adolescents versus the more central position of schooling in the lives of their East Asian counterparts.
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The authors used the Twenty Statements Test in 2 studies to investigate gender and country differences in the spontaneous self-descriptions of 811 college students from Hong Kong, India, Nepal, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe and 136 secondary school students from Taiwan and Hong Kong. The authors performed statistical analysis and found no significant gender differences in the percentage of responses classified as belonging to the idiocentric self in either study. However, the authors found significant Country effects in both studies for responses classified as representing the idiocentric self and some aspects of the collective self, and the authors found significant Country x Gender effects involving all 4 categories of the idiocentric self and the collective self for the college students. These findings raise questions about the generalizability of Western findings that males are more likely to espouse an independent conception of self than females. However, as the authors predicted, females were more likely to use small group self-descriptions than their male peers.
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Private supplementary tutoring has long been a major phenomenon in parts of East Asia, including Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan. In recent times it has grown dramatically in other parts of Asia and in Africa, Europe and North America. The factors underlying the growth of private tutoring vary, but in all settings it has major implications for learning and livelihood. Families with the necessary resources are able to secure not only greater quantities but also better qualities of private tutoring. Children receiving such tutoring are then able to perform better in school, and in the long run to improve their lifetime earnings. By contrast, children of low‐income families who do not receive such benefits may not be able to keep up with their peers and may drop out of school at an earlier age. Tutoring also of course has a direct impact on the livelihoods of the tutors, providing employment and incomes for a range of professionals and amateurs of different age groups. The dynamics of inter‐relationships are complex, and vary from one setting to another. This paper argues that private supplementary tutoring deserves much more attention from policy makers and researchers.
[Copyright of Compare: A Journal of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057920601024974]

In the so-called 'global age', the issue of how children learn to locate themselves in the world is an important one. Working from a foundation of theories related to globalisation, identity development and citizenship education, this paper describes the findings of a research project which explored elementary school children's geographical and affective location of the self in Japan, Macau and Hong Kong. Analysis and discussion of Japanese education policy is then presented in an attempt to explain the finding that Japanese children are far less likely than their counterparts in Hong Kong and Macau to locate themselves in an international sphere.
[Copyright of Compare: A Journal of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057920050034084]