Drawing on the empirical data of the Learning Study projects conducted in primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong since 2000, this paper discusses the relationship between teacher act and the improvement of students' learning. This paper argues that students' perception of the object of learning depends on how they experience the pattern of variation created by the teacher during the teaching act. "What varies" and "what remains invariant" both matter. Thus teaching should be a conscious structuring act, where teachers actively construct the learning experiences for the students so that they can experience appropriate variations in the object of learning, in order to bring about the intended discernment and learning.
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The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of "Focused Word Recognition Method" in teaching a student with reading difficulties in Hong Kong. "Focused Word Recognition Method" is considered as a structured and systematic instruction for word identification. The Chinese characters are grouped for instruction by making use of their phonological, orthographic or semantic features. The participant in this study was an 11-year-old student in the Intensive Remedial Teaching Programme in Primary Schools (IRTP). He had difficulties in reading and writing Chinese characters. The stimulus materials of this study were five lists of Chinese characters. Each list consisted of characters with similar orthographic features. This training programme lasted for four weeks. Comparison of the results of pre-tests and post-tests showed that the student made significant improvement in the performances of dictation, reading aloud and fill-in the blanks activities.
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Civic education has been idealized and assigned the mission of preparing critical thinking, responsible, participating, multidimensional citizens. But on the other hand, civic education is also charged with the responsibility of moralizing the citizens into characters like punctuality, obedience, docility, deference . It is also used to serve the function of nationalistic education: Instilling the sense of national identity , loyalty to the nation state and patriotism.
Many Asian countries have strong elements of nationalistic education in their civic education . In 1996, one year before the return of sovereignty of Hong Kong to Chinas, a new official Guidelines on Civic Education in Schools (1996), proposing a curriculum framework with equal emphasis on human rights education, education for democracy, education for rule of law, nationalistic education, global education and education for critical thinking was introduced by the Education Department, which is to be implemented in schools starting from September of 1996. After 1 July, 1997, there was a very strong pressure from the society, asking for more nationalistic education and more schools were taking the initiative to implement nationalistic education.
Does the the mission of civic education : preparing critical thinking, responsible, participating, multidimensional citizens, contradict with that of nationalistic education : instilling the sense of national identity , loyalty to the nation state and patriotism ? This paper attempts to construct a framework to study (1) whether there are contradiction and (2)whether the practice of nationalistic education in schools is different from that of civic education.
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