This article reports the results of a multiple qualitative case study which investigated the challenges that seven early career English language teachers in Hong Kong confronted as they constructed their professional and personal identities. A series of in-depth interviews with participants during the entire first year of their full-time teaching experience provided a longitudinal perspective on the teachers’ experiences of becoming teachers. A contribution of this study is to examine such experiences using the analytical lens of teacher identity. The case studies illustrate that these teachers faced considerable challenges in constructing teacher identities as they negotiated the dominant discourses of teaching and learning within individual Hong Kong schools. It is argued that school-based support for early career teachers should include the problematisation of the identity positions available to all teachers within the profession as a whole in order to support the construction of the professional and personal identities that these teachers place a premium upon. Implications for teacher education and future research are also discussed.
[Copyright © 2015 Taylor & Francis.]

The study of linguistic sexism started in Western societies in the 1970s with the women's movement, which challenged patriarchal dominance in all facets of life. One of the main concerns of early language and gender research was to expose the distorted representation of the sexes in language use and in language systems. Linguistic sexism, by definition, refers to the use of language expressions in such a way that it constitutes an unbalanced portrayal of the sexes. Traditionally, masculine 'generics' such as he and the morpheme man are used to represent both sexes when the sex is unknown or unspecified, or when the sexes of the referents are mixed. Given that students are frequently required to assimilate the materials of their textbooks in detail, they have the potential to influence the development of students' gender-based attitudes at an impressionable age. The present study examines the problem of sexism in ESL materials used in Hong Kong secondary schools in terms of both gender roles and linguistic sexism. In view of the heightened awareness of the importance of gender equity in Hong Kong in recent years, we examine linguistic sexism from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. We investigate whether there has been any change in gender representation in recent textbooks and those used in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Using both quantitative and qualitative analyses, we investigate whether there is any tendency to omit females in verbal and pictorial texts. Other areas such as the order of appearance of males and females, depiction of the domestic, occupational and social roles of the two sexes, use of masculine generic constructions and naming conventions are also examined.

This paper presents an overview of mathematics education in Hong Kong and the education reform it is experiencing. The original mathematics curricula had been successful in certain ways (as demonstrated by the achievements of Hong Kong students who placed fourth in TIMSS); however, there were also negative aspects. The revision in both primary and secondary mathematics education aims to shift the emphasis to the development of thinking abilities and positive attitudes of students towards learning the subject. Mathematics is expected to provide a basis for making investigations as well as a tool for analyzing data, representing findings, and formulating theories. Teachers are encouraged to adopt a student-centered, activity-based, and hands-on approach to organize students' learning, and to make use of concrete examples from everyday life whenever possible. Student learning is expected to progress from concrete to abstract, and calculators and computers are expected to be used to facilitate student learning. Some implications of these approaches are also discussed.

English language remains an important learning component of all university students in Hong Kong. Regardless of their academic interests, all pre-service teachers whose specialisms are not English are also compulsorily required to study English during their first year of university years. Does it mean these non-English subject trained pre-service teachers will be de-motivated to learn English? How do they respond to English learning even if they do not expect to teach English in the future? What learning strategies do they adopt during English lessons? In this paper, we attempt to look at a group of non-English major pre-service teachers' motivation to learn English. Through the research instruments of questionnaire and in-depth interviews with teachers and students, data are to be collected to analyse their motivation and attitudes to learn English.

Whilst institute-school partnerships have been investigated extensively as potentially valuable routes for the professional preparations of student teachers (Booth, Furling and Wilkin, 1990; McCullough and Fidler, 1994), considerably less is known as to how co-operating teachers/ teaching advisers process their roles and the nature of effect of their dynamic relationships with student teachers on their own professional lives. This paper attempts to present the voices of four teaching advisers who participated in the Honorary Teaching Adviser Scheme of an initial teacher education programme in Hong Kong. Data collected through semi-structured interviews, lesson observations, and post-observation conferences present a general picture of the challenges and promises of the Scheme as perceived by the teaching advisers on their own professional growth. Findings point to the need for re- envisioning the full potential of mentoring in teacher preparation and continuing professional development. Data from a previous study will also be contrasted to illustrate teachers' progression from resistance to readiness to assume an expanding role in teacher preparation. The paper will conclude with suggestions for fostering an effective and productive professional learning experience for both student teachers and teaching advisers.

This paper reports the processes and ways in which a dedicated website has been developed by a group of seven colleagues at the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) Science Department to support their student-teachers' development of teaching competence during various kinds of field experience activities such as practicum, teaching practice and school visits etc. From the outcome of our project, a comprehensive web-based system was created with the following specially selected features to help our student-teachers develop confidence and skills for the effective teaching of various science topics in schools: A data bank of 20 sets of video clips on exemplary parts of students' teaching performance in schools or microteaching at HKIEd as identified and selected by their supervisors. A collection of virtual reality resources which include a typical classroom or laboratory environment with a 3D/panoramic view etc. A website called Field Experience Support on Science (FESS) being developed at http://www.ied.edu.hk/fess/ which provides a platform for the management of the aforementioned 2 types of resources in the WWW plus various synchronous or 2 asynchronous communication channels as well as sharing of lesson plans, schemes of work and other teaching resources etc.