According to the Curriculum Guide issued by the Education Bureau in Hong Kong, English should not be taught as a formal subject and children should be EUR exposed' to it. This paper presents findings from a questionnaire survey and classroom observations on how teachers in Hong Kong preschools help children learn English. It examines the various ways teachers create a rich environment for the children to be exposed to English as a second language.

The popularity and desirability of English language education has become somewhat unbeatable in Asian countries. In this essay, highlighting the examples of Taiwan and Hong Kong, I seek to understand the multiple threads of reasoning systems that come together to constitute and sustain the desirability of English learning. In that, I conceptualize that language education is more than teaching and learning a new/foreign language. Language is intertwined with the sphere of culture. Thus, I hope to encourage an alternative perspective for rethinking the “heat” of English language education in Asian countries.In that, I seek to underscore that it is imperative to rethinking the effects of English language education.

Come August 2009, schools in Hong Kong will be rolling out a new Language Arts Elective called "Learning English Through Popular Culture" to be offered to the Senior Form. This new Popular Culture elective in the New Senior Curriculum is of analytic interest as Hong Kong is the first schooling system, at least in Asia, to take Popular Culture seriously and translate it as "curriculum-as-knowledge" in the national curriculum. While the relationship between Popular Culture and its relevance for schooling and classroom pedagogies has been explored in educational research, in the last decade or so, research conducted in this field has yielded a somewhat tentative and predictable finding often expressed as "pedagogical implications for literacy education and curriculum development" and, as isolated case studies. Yet the Hong Kong education system has taken up what appears to be a bold move to re-design its English Language Curriculum to include Popular Culture - a new curriculum that ostensibly takes into consideration students' interests in popular cultural texts to promote the learning of English. Promising as this new curriculum might be, there are however inherent pedagogical trouble spots in the spelled out curriculum. This paper critically examines and unpacks the articulation of the pedagogical knowledge of the new elective. Although the "curriculum-in-use" remains to be seen, I argue in this paper that the pedagogical investments of this new elective as defined in the curriculum, is reduced to "reading" and "writing" text types, where students are likely to be locked into a procedural way of "thinking" and "doing" popular cultural texts. I suggest how a critical pedagogical practice might be a more productive way of teaching the popular culture curriculum.

As part of a package of measures designed to enrich the English language learning environment in Hong Kong schools, the government has recruited up to 700 native-speaking teachers of English (NETs) to join the predominantly non-native speaking Chinese staff teaching English in the local secondary schools. To get an accurate assessment of the operation of the NET scheme, an evaluation project entitled The Monitoring and Evaluation of the Native-speaking English Teacher Scheme (MENETS) was commissioned by a language and research funding body of the government. This large scale research project, involving some 100 schools, employs three major methods to achieve its investigative purposes: assessments, questionnaires, and case studies. In this paper, the presenter will focus on the quantitative measurement of the ESL learners' spoken & written language production before and after increased exposure to a native speaker model.