Short term international experience programmes are a common element of English second language (ESL) teacher education in many countries. This chapter problematizes the belief that such programmes necessarily result in beneficial changes in preservice teachers thinking about themselves as teachers – their beliefs, habits, and values – by exploring the experiences of eight preservice ESL teachers from Hong Kong as they undertook a short term international experience programme in Australia. Drawing on a theory of identity construction, the findings suggest that identity conflicts impacted how the student teachers experienced this programme as they struggled to reconcile past, present, and future trajectories of teacher identity. In particular, the student teachers constructed rigid divisions between different types of teachers and teaching they experienced at home and abroad. These divisions were reflected in antagonistic relations between the types of English language teachers and teaching they aligned their own teaching activities and practices with and the teacher identities that they perceived to be available to them within the Hong Kong education system. Implications for addressing such identity conflicts throughout international experience programmes are considered and implications for future research are discussed.
[Copyright © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht]

This paper outlines the changes in English medium of instruction policy in Hong Kong secondary schools since it became a specially administered region of China on 1st July, 1997. It gives a brief description of the background to the present situation, outlining the special place of English in Hong Kong schools and the reasons for the failure of policy initiatives in the past. The rationale for the present policy changes is critically discussed as are reasons for the resistance to change in certain Hong Kong schools as expressed by the school principals, the staff, parents and pupils. The paper concludes by examining the success of the present policy initiatives and examines the future of English medium education in Hong Kong schools.

This paper reviews a series of studies on the effects of accent on second language listening comprehension (L2 LC). It is shown that some of the studies have been misinterpreted as indicating the existence of an own, or local, accent advantage in L2 listening. From the review, it is clear that there is insufficient evidence to support such conclusions. Given previous research findings and current state of knowledge concerning the LC process, it is hypothesised that different but familiar accents should cause no problems for L2 listeners. This hypothesis is tested in an experiment featuring 63 Hong Kong school students. The results support the hypothesis. From the findings, it is argued that degree of familiarity is the crucial issue with regard to whether a particular accent causes LC problems for L2 listeners to English. In contrast, whether or not a speaker's accent is similar to the listener's is a secondary issue, which is important only in so far as it relates to the issue of familiarity.
[Copyright © 1997 Sage Publications.]

This paper explores how Hong Kong student teachers develop professional knowledge in learning to teach English as a Second Language (ESL). Three student teachers were tracked over the two years of their initial teacher education programme with data collected at periodic intervals during the programme in order to chart the development of their professional knowledge. Results show that although the student teachers underwent critical changes in their thinking and knowledge, these changes were not necessarily reflected in their classroom practice. This enquiry into the student teachers’ professional learning extends our understanding of the impact of initial teacher education on ESL student teachers’ thinking about language teaching and learning, and their development of pedagogical knowledge. Implications are drawn for developing second language teacher education programmes in the Hong Kong context.
[Copyright © 2003 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

Research into the teaching and learning of speaking in the ESL context is relatively neglected. There have been only a few studies that addressed the need to incorporate the development of strategic competence into the L2 oral classroom (e.g., Cohen, 1998; Dornyei, 1995; Konishi & Tarone, 2004). This paper will report findings from a strategy interventionist study conducted in the secondary English oral classroom in Hong Kong. Based on a psycholinguistic model of speech processing, eight strategies were identified and introduced to the treatment class in the study. A data collection method comprising stimulated recall interviews and observations that aimed to investigate respectively the learning process (i.e., covert thoughts) and the learning product (i.e., overt speech) was employed. A comparison of the findings between the treatment class and the control class which was not exposed to any strategies-based instruction supports the view that not all strategies are equal and that some are more teachable than the others. Specifically, 'Resourcing' seems to function as a 'bedrock strategy' for young L2 speakers. Possible implications for strategy instruction are made with a view to enhancing the development of strategic competence in the L2 classroom.
[Copyright © 2005 The Asian Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language.]

Within the English language teaching profession there is now general acceptance of the advantages of integrating language and content teaching. Yet challenges continue over how such integration can be accomplished within individual classrooms. In Asian universities using English as the medium of instruction (EMI), one of the key barriers to integration is the alleged reticence of learners to participate in spoken discourse within the classroom. If the language policy aims of these institutions are to be realized, these constraints need to be acknowledged. This paper uses a multidimensional investment framework to investigate the oral participation of one group of foreign language learners within their English for academic purposes (EAP) classroom at an EMI university in Hong Kong. Drawing on data from interviews, classroom observations, audiovisual recordings of classroom interaction, and documentary analysis, this paper argues that the successful integration of language and content teaching should include an appreciation of the institutional forces that constrain and enable learners' oral investment, how learners deploy a variety of knowledge, skills and understandings in support of this investment, and the degree of freedom learners enjoy in shaping the processes and products of their investments. The implications of this research for classroom practices are explored.
[Copyright © 2008 John Benjamins Publishing Company.]

This paper examines how Hong Kong has developed from a diglossic society, where the relationship between English and Chinese were largely in complementary distribution to each other, into a bilingual society, where there is a proliferation of mixed codes, involving a continuum of language use from “high” Cantonese and English to “low” Cantonese with code switching. Against this background, the Government’s recently promulgated mandatory language policy on the medium of instruction in secondary schools is examined. Though the obvious purpose of this policy is to improve the credibility and prestige of mother tongue education, it has the effect of creating a set of elite monolingual English medium schools. Whether these will be able to fully serve the needs of a bilingual society is discussed, especially as Putonghua and High Cantonese are increasingly used in the domains of government and higher education, and a variety of mixed codes and modes used in other social and domestic domains. The paper concludes with a preliminary examination into possible directions in research into the development of a bilingual teaching code, which is genre and domain sensitive and responsive to student needs.
[Copyright © 2000 International Association for Intercultural Communication Studies.]