Subordinate femininity associated with feminine Japanese has been found to pose barriers for foreign language learners of Japanese, especially among Western female learners of Japanese. The present study investigates attitudes towards the use of both masculine and feminine Japanese among non-native professional speakers of Japanese. The latter's experiences can enlighten language educators in their efforts to help struggling learners cope with using language loaded with traditional gender roles and gender inequality. Data from interviews with male and female professionals who use Japanese in the courses of their work in Japanese companies in Hong Kong were used to study the problems posed by 'masculine' and 'feminine' Japanese for foreign learners of Japanese. It was found that Hong Kong professionals often use masculine and feminine Japanese in order to gain native-speaker status in the language. The study has implications not merely for the teaching of Japanese as a foreign language but also for the teaching of gendered aspects of foreign languages generally, especially when professional identity and status are involved.
[Copyright of Language, Culture and Curriculum is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07908310802287681]

The mandatory use of mother tongue education in Hong Kong after 1997 met strong objections from the local community. While the government put forward a comprehensive educational agenda to justify the implementation of the policy, this paper raises the question of whether the change in language policy was mainly driven by an educational agenda, or whether there were other underlying agendas. To address the question, the history of the medium of instruction in Hong Kong is reviewed, and the experience of three decolonised Asian countries, Malaysia, Singapore and India, is discussed. The paper suggests that the political agenda has always played an important role in language policy formulation and implementation. In view of the important role that language plays in nation building and social reconstruction, it is inevitable that Chinese medium instruction will become more and more important. How the government will balance the need to strengthen the national identity of Hong Kong people and the need to maintain the international out look and economic development of Hong Kong will have a major impact on there view of the new medium of instruction policy in 2001.
[Copyright of Language, Culture and Curriculum is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07908319908666578]

Science fiction in language classes can be very motivating for students. The stories frequently contain social dilemmas and conflicts. Such reading demands personal responses from readers. A college EFL course using science fiction texts and films can help students whose imminent concern is not only language proficiency, but also the culture of an English-speaking world. This paper presents two responses in the author's EFL classes on helping students find joy in reading and thereby enhancing language skills through different activities, including the use of films. It was found that a lecture approach would not favour some Hong Kong students who have not had any literature training. On the other hand, a more student-oriented approach which values students' opinions made a significant difference. Such information is useful to other EFL programmes in English-speaking countries, and to an introductory literature course where there are EFL members in class.
[Copyright of Language, Culture and Curriculum is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07908310208666632]

Despite the fact that Hong Kong is now a part of China, there are differences between Hong Kong and the main land, especially in terms of the education system, school environment, and learning culture,and learner proficiency level of English. Based on interviews with ten secondary school teachers, the paper discusses the difficulties caused by the recent influx of children from China into Hong Kong. Firstly, there are difficulties for the immigrants themselves. They have to search for a school that will accept the children, and the children are often rejected because their English is not good enough. Secondly, there are difficulties for the classroom teacher. Added to the problems of teaching through English,there are now additional problems with the Chinese children, such as different first languages and no single lingua franca. And there are difficulties for the schools, for example, caused by the lack of systematic admission procedures, and insufficient support for schools and teachers in this respect.The paper makes a number of observations and recommendations that may help to alleviate the situation.
[Copyright of Language, Culture and Curriculum is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07908319908666580]

In this paper, I analyse pupil-teacher dialogue, in a mixture of English and Cantonese, from a segment of a Form 2(Grade 8, 13-14yrs) English reading lesson. The lesson was video taped in a working-class school in Hong Kong, and the excerpt is taken from a larger corpus of similar lesson data videotaped in the class over three consecutive weeks. The analysis shows how these Cantonese children, with limited English, succeeded in subverting the reading lesson, which was based entirely on information extraction tasks.Instead, they negotiated their own preferred comic-style narratives by cleverly making use of the response slots of the IRF (Initiation-Response-Feedback) discourse format used in the lesson. Thus they achieved genuinely creative responses, in spite of the curriculum. The implications for teaching are discussed.
[Copyright of Language, Culture and Curriculum is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07908319908666585]

The management of change has long been recognised to be a complex and challenging process. The literature has revealed few success stories and many examples of curriculum innovations being adopted half-heartedly or not at all. Set against the increasing world globalisation of which education is apart, the cultural aspects of innovations are being increasingly discussed in recent years. This paper focuses on the cultural dimensions of a major curriculum reform in Hong Kong, the Target-Oriented Curriculum (TOC) initiative. The main principles of TOC and its early implementation are discussed. A number of the main features of TOC are analysed with particular reference to their cultural appropriateness for the Hong Kong context. The thesis underlying the paper is that cultural issues need to be more carefully considered in the policy and adoption stages of the innovation process. In English Language teaching, it may be necessary to reflect more deeply on the suitability of the export of Western-based learner-centred, communicative or task-based approaches to other milieux where such approaches may not be commensurate with the local cultural context.
[Copyright of Language, Culture and Curriculum is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07908319908666581]

Both Japan and Hong Kong seek to enhance the English standard of their secondary school students by implementing a native-speaking English teachers scheme, named the JET (Japan Exchange and Teaching) Programme in Japan and the NET (Native-speaking English Teachers) Scheme in Hong Kong. However, the implications of these programmes seem to be sociopolitical more than educational. As for Japan, JET is a consequence of an explicit political strategy to promote international relationships. The Japanese Government is keen to bring up a generation that is able to understand other countries yet retain Japanese national consciousness. On the surface, the Hong Kong NET Scheme seems to be a more straightforward language improvement programme. However, the Japanese experience suggests another level of analysis. The Hong Kong Government is never as explicit as Japan as to what it wants to achieve through the NET Scheme. Though NET is claimed to be a language improvement scheme, there is no evidence to show how effectively this kind of programme can work in local Hong Kong secondary schools. With a special interest in the ideologies behind the two language improvement programmes, this paper attempts to explore their sociopolitical and cultural meanings beyond their educational surface.
[Copyright of Language, Culture and Curriculum is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07908319908666579]

This paper argues against the notion that Chinese students do not volunteer to participate in tutorial discussion. Participation in tutorial discussion by Chinese students is, to a large extent, influenced by their traditional Chinese concepts of learning. Some traditional Chinese concepts of learning that may influence students' perception and participation in tutorial discussion include education and self-realisation, learning and effort, respect for superiors, and communication preference. Interview data obtained from a group of Chinese tertiary students in Hong Kong has shed some light on the subtle relationship between the traditional Chinese concepts of learning and students' behaviour in tutorial discussion. The students believed that their rate of participation was dependent on their efforts in preparing for tutorial discussion, acquaintance with group members and tutor guidance. They were willing to use English to express their ideas if they were well prepared. With these three factors in mind, some pedagogies are suggested for teachers. It is hoped that this paper and its recommendations can contribute to the teaching of Chinese students in both Hong Kong and overseas.
[Copyright of Language, Culture and Curriculum is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07908319908666582]

The survey involved 1978 Cantonese native-speaking subjects undertaking a programme of English in the Workplace (EIW) at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. This number represents almost the complete population of undergraduate students undertaking this mandatory course in their second year of tertiary-level study. The students answered a questionnaire, previously piloted in a sub-sample of 30, and were assigned on the basis of their responses to the four categories of motivational regulation proposed in Deci and Ryan (1985): External, Introjected, Identified and Integra the conventional classification of motivation into Extrinsic and Intrinsic, or Instrumental and Integrative, has serious limitations in the field of language learning and fails to provide a meaningful developmental model for students and teachers. The pilot study drew attention to the need to add a category of Avoidant, for students for whom all of the expressions of motivation to learn English, were found to be excessive. The main study showed that Identified Regulation was dominant (49%) and suggests that the transition from Identified to Integrated Regulation is the principal challenge facing teachers and students. Some 19% of the students fell into the Avoidant category. The implications of the study are discussed.
[Copyright of Language, Culture and Curriculum is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07908319908666583]

*With the use of the instrument of questionnaires, the English proficiency, the translation ability, and the suitability of mixed code in the English classroom of 48 graduating native Cantonese-speaking students on a BA Honors course in teaching English as a Secondary Language were examined by the author.