Teachers beliefs about their ability to affect students' performance is an important part of professionalism. This study compared 725 Hong Kong and 575 Shanghai primary in-service teachers on their teacher efficacy. Two Chinese versions of the 12-item Teachers' Sense of Efficacy Scale were used in this study since some wordings of the Hong Kong version of the Scale (HK-TSE) were different from the Shanghai version (STSE) as a result of cultural differences. Basically, the Shanghai teachers reported significantly higher efficacy than did the Hong Kong teachers. After reviewing these quantitative results, 86 follow-up questionnaires from Shanghai in-service teachers who also participated in the first part of this study were collected. Results of this qualitative part showed that the three most commonly cited factors for the contribution of teacher efficacy were: respect and confidence placed in them by students and parents, the training they received from universities and the experience they gained from daily teaching practice. Though Hong Kong in-service teachers had lower efficacy scores than the Shanghai counterparts.
[Copyright of Australian Educational Researcher is the property of Australian Association for Research in Education.
Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://www.aare.edu.au/aer/about.htm]

This paper discusses the findings of a survey conducted over three years in Hong Kong and Taiwan concerning the nature of business and human resource strategies in the two regions. The differences between the two regions in relation to business and human resource strategy are noted, with particular emphasis on the implications for the development of management education in the Asian region. The importance of incorporating and interpreting business and human resource strategy according to culturally relevant differences between the two regions is also noted.
[Copyright of Journal of Teaching in International Business is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/J066v12n02_04]

This study examines young children's number sense in subjects from Finland (n=254), Hong Kong (n= 246), and Singapore (n = 130). Chinese, English and Finnish versions of the Early Numeracy Test (ENT; Van Luit et al, 1994) were used. Two highly correlated aspects of number sense were measured, one reflecting children's abilities to organize and compare quantities (i.e. relational skills), and the other pertaining to their ability to operate with number-word sequence (i.e. counting skills). The results showed significant age-related gain on the relational and counting scales. No gender or language differences were found. The children in Hong Kong and Singapore outperformed those in Finland in relational and counting tasks starting at the age of four years. The children in Singapore also had better relational and counting skills than those in Hong Kong. Differences in teaching were assumed to explain the findings.
[Copyright of International Journal of Early Years Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0966976042000268681]

This paper investigates L2 English learners' reactions to mixed personality in a pedagogic grammar. Personality refers to how authors represent themselves in a text and interact with their readers (e.g. personally via the use of personal pronouns or impersonally via the use of the passive, etc.); mixed personality occurs when an author switches from one option to another. In an experiment, 195 students from Hong Kong and Poland were asked to read a text in which the author switched from we to you. The expectation that this mixing would cause we to be interpreted as exclusive was not borne out; however, some students did attach negative attributes to you as a result of its proximity to we. Another finding was that awareness of the generic reference of we was higher than that for you. Writers of pedagogic grammars are encouraged to be more aware of the referential complexities of personal pronouns.
[Copyright of Language Awareness is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09585170902763973]

Under intensified pressures for improving the global competence of university graduates, national governments across different parts of the globe have to on the one hand expand higher education enrolments and on the other hand assure high quality in teaching and research in order to make sure their higher education systems can compete globally. Many Asian states have been in the forefront of this effort to improve national competitiveness by raising their higher education enrolment rate. As state financing and provision alone will not satisfy the growing demands for higher education, governments in Asia adopt more pro-competition policy instruments and increasingly look to the market/private sectors in running higher education. Therefore the private higher education sector has paid for much of the higher education sector expansion, leading to revolutionary changes and imparting a growing 'privateness' to Asian higher education systems. This article sets out in this wider socio-economic context to examine the rise of transnational higher education in three Asian societies: Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. With particular reference to examining how the growing prominence of privateness in higher education has challenged the conventional education governance models, this article critically examines how these Asian states have reinvented their regulatory regimes to govern the growing complexity and highly contested public-private mix in higher education.
[Copyright of Pacific Review is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09512740801990220]

Viewing education as a complex site for endorsing and contesting knowledges and practices we explore its critical roles in feminist language planning. Many types of language planning have relied heavily on education for the implementation and spread of the particular reform agenda largely reliant on discourses of compulsory obligation (e.g. spelling reforms). The scenario of feminist language planning reveals that education is not a mere external agent of implementation but central to the raising of awareness or provoking an 'Initiating Trajectory' (Winter & Pauwels, 2003). However, the implementation of gender-inclusive practices ('Trajectories of Practices') in education highlights contexts of conflict (and confusion) about grammatical prescriptions and social reform (Pauwels & Winter, 2006). In this paper we probe the adoption, problematisation and invigoration of 'Agency Trajectories' in (language) educators' narratives and classroom practices. Our investigation includes educators operating in diverse English-language communities (e.g. Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong).
[Copyright of Current Issues in Language Planning is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/cilp093.0 ]