An overview is presented of a three-year project aimed at helping Chinese language teachers in Taiwan refine ways that Chinese, an ideographic language that differs markedly from alphabetic English, is taught in primary schools. Guided by university staff in Taiwan, Hong Kong University and a Taiwanese non-government social enterprise, 20 experienced Taiwanese Chinese language teachers visited Hong Kong, observed literacy lessons, held in-depth discussions with principals and teachers, and engaged in seminars that helped them reflect on ways to modify practice in Taiwan. Back in Taiwan, they tried out techniques witnessed in Hong Kong, shared their experiences with colleagues in and beyond their own school, and evaluated their relevance for language teaching in Taiwan. Experiences were exchanged via practical demonstrations of techniques, video-recordings of lessons, accounts of new ways to teach Chinese, interviews and progress reports on an Internet forum. The outcomes are an example of positive teacher change.
[Copyright of Teacher Development is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13664530.2012.722439]

Lynch and Purnawarman (2004:50) point out that "a solid electronic portfolio can show reflection, evolution of thought and overall professional development". Research shows that electronic portfolio assessment, if implemented thoughtfully, can successfully engage learners in critical thinking and problem solving, promote lifelong education, encourage self evaluation and allow learners to have a higher degree of control over the learning process (Pierson and Kumari, 2000; Mason, Pegler, and Weller, 2004). Given the value of electronic portfolios, there has been growing interest in using electronic portfolio assessment to support teacher education (Lynch and Purnawarman, 2004). In this paper, we discuss on-going efforts at the University of Hong Kong to design assessment tasks for a language awareness course entitled "Pedagogical Content Knowledge". The final-year student teachers taking the course are required to compile an electronic portfolio based on their reflections on the relevance and applicability of the issues relating to dealing with the content of learning in pedagogical practice discussed in the course. This paper sets out to describe and analyze issues relating to the design and implementation of the assessment, focusing specifically on the challenges that the research team faces. In our paper, we draw on a range of data, including student teachers' feedback on the assessment and in-depth reflections of two student teachers after the assessment to critically evaluate the extent to which the assessment has achieved the intended learning outcomes. The reflective study shows that apart from technical support, methodological and psychological preparation designed to help students to take on a more active role in the learning and assessment process are also needed to help students to perform effectively in the computer-supported assessment. Implications are drawn for those who plan to conduct electronic portfolio assessment in higher education.
[Copyright

There has been increasing research on the study of discourse markers (DMs) in terms of their pragmatic use. However, their pedagogic use in the ESL classroom has received less attention. This paper explores the attitudes of Hong Kong teachers towards the pedagogic values of DMs using a questionnaire (N=132), a reliability test, factor analysis, and interviews (N=3) with NS and NNS teacher-informants. Both the quantitative and qualitative results indicate a very positive perception of the pragmatic and pedagogic values of DMs by the subjects, where students at the intermediate-advanced level are challenged to acquire DMs for both receptive and productive purposes. The findings also 200 reveal the underrepresentation of DMs in existing teaching materials and in subjects' teaching. The study proposes the need to develop learners' linguistic awareness of this aspect of spoken features to facilitate communication and suggests that DMs can be included as part of the lexical input in the ESL/EFL syllabus. The results have implications for utilizing corpora to exploit the polyfunctionalities of DMs in different contexts and across registers, modifying existing teaching materials and promoting professional involvement in preparing learners to develop more effective communication.
[Copyright of Asian EFL Journal is the property of Nanzan University.
Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://www.asian-efl-journal.com/]

Liberal studies is a new subject in the new senior secondary curriculum in Hong Kong. This study attempted to identify factors that shape liberal studies student teachers' decisions in lesson planning. Based on interview data and lesson plans developed by the student teachers, this article maintains that four factors interacted with the subject features of liberal studies to shape the student teachers' planning decisions, namely, teacher knowledge, curriculum requirements, materials and resources, and interaction with equal and more capable partners. This paper further looks into how teacher knowledge expresses itself at different stages of lesson planning. The findings suggest that to facilitate enquiry learning in students, liberal studies teachers need to adopt an enquiry stance in lesson planning. This paper argues that the limitations of liberal studies student teachers' content knowledge need to be addressed in teacher preparation programmes and suggests teacher networking as one way to strengthen novice liberal studies teachers' content preparation. The implications for teacher education are discussed.
[Copyright of Journal of Education for Teaching is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02607476.2011.558287]