This study is designed to investigate the impact of school-based curriculum development teams on teacher development and pupil learning, within the tradition of school-based curriculum development in a primary school in Hong Kong. Teacher and pupil interviews are used to evaluate the extent that teacher engagement in curriculum decision making processes within two school based curriculum development teams has led to teacher professional development which will be triangulated with the video taped meetings and tryout lessons. Pupils’ perspectives about how the innovation is perceived are to be collected in order to extend our understanding of the underlying principles in implementing curriculum changes in schools. Qualitative evidence reveals positively that participating teachers have developed themselves professionally through the process of planning, implementing and reflecting (PIR model) upon curriculum practice and innovation under certain conditions. However, the complexity of the structures and processes that are established for involving teachers in curriculum decision making processes needs further empirical and theoretical work.

This study investigates the development of reading in young Chinese learners of English in Hong Kong by comparing the effects of a guided reading intervention to an alternative treatment based on reading from e-books and a no-treatment control group. The key features of the guided reading intervention included: instruction on reading strategies and opportunities for interaction for negotiation of meaning with peers. The e-book reading focused on reading stories from CD-ROMs with embedded instructional features including opportunities to hear the stories and engage in routine word and text games but without any interaction with peers or any guidance from a teacher. Two hundred and five children, aged 9??0 years, from six primary schools in Hong Kong were stratified for gender and reading proficiency in English and randomly assigned to one of the three groups: the guided reading group, the e-book reading group and the no-treatment control group. The treatments were delivered as additional reading sessions on top of normal classroom instruction. Pre-and post-intervention tests revealed that children in the guided reading group significantly improved their reading comprehension and reading accuracy scores compared to the no-treatment control group. The children in the e-book reading group did not improve significantly compared to the no-treatment group in reading comprehension although there was significant improvement in reading accuracy. However, there was no significant difference between the children in the guided reading group and the e-book reading group ineither reading comprehension or reading accuracy scores. The pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed in the context of teaching English in primary schools in Hong Kong.
[Copyright of Language Learning Journal is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09571736.2011.625214]