Legitimate teacher authority is fundamental to effective teaching, but is often a thorny issue that teachers need to grapple with when teaching in cross-cultural teaching contexts. By interviewing 18 pre-service Chinese language teachers on their understanding of legitimate teacher authority throughout teaching practicum at international schools in Hong Kong, this study revealed that the teachers changed their perception about the essentiality and the nature of the pedagogical and interpersonal components of legitimate teacher authority. They developed a more nuanced and balanced understanding about legitimate teacher authority over time. However, their abilities in reaching the balance were constrained by their cultural knowledge and skills in achieving positive interpersonal dynamics when implementing student-centred pedagogies.
[Copyright of Journal of Education for Teaching is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02607476.2015.1081717]

The Teachers’ Conceptions of Assessment inventory has been used in studies with primary and secondary school teachers in New Zealand and Queensland. It has been translated and used in two studies in Chinese contexts (i.e., Hong Kong and China). The Western studies consistently support the existence of four inter-correlated conceptions (i.e., assessment makes schools accountable, assessment makes students accountable, assessment improves teaching and learning, assessment is irrelevant). While similar factors have been found in the two Chinese studies, it was apparent that the factor inter-correlations were quite different. This was especially noted around the relationship of improvement and student accountability factors which were highly correlated in Chinese studies but weakly correlated in Western studies. This suggests that while the British assessment for learning policy is being advocated around the world, there may significant factors in how assessment is understood and used in Chinese contexts that require an alternative policy development. To that end, two studies have been conducted to extend our understanding of what assessment means to teachers in Chinese contexts.

Many school subjects in Hong Kong now have a component of school-based assessment (SBA) to enable a better judgment of students' performance. However, how SBA could be used at classroom level is often a concern to many teachers. Using three core school subjects, namely, Chinese Language, English Language, and Maths as the context, this paper discusses how school-based assessment could be implemented successfully in the classroom.

In the past ten years, Hong Kong Government has promoted the concept of biliteracy (Chinese and English) and trilingualism (Cantonese, Putonghua and English) in education. Putonghua has become an important issue in the school curriculum. Educators debate how and when Putonghua should be taught. In the preschool context, whether Putonghua should be taught as a formal subject or informally through fun and games has been debated. Another critical issue is how parents could help children to learn better outside schools. This paper presents findings on the learning and teaching of Putonghua from interviews with parents and school teachers and principals.

This study aims at exploring student writing of Chinese characters at their teachers’ dictation in a primary school in Hong Kong. Sample writings of 106 Primary 3 students produced in 12 dictation lessons were collected over a school term. The students wrote a total of 1441 characters. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the student writings. The main results are: First, the students correctly produced a large majority of about 90% of the characters at the dictation. Second, the categories of errors that the students made in writing the characters were diverse. Third, the students made a different combination of errors in writing the semantic and phonetic radicals of the characters. Fourth, a considerable portion of their errors was related to whether they were able to reproduce the specifics of the characters. This study examines the performance of the students after they have been taught to write, hoping to have direct implications to how teachers should teach students to write.
[Copyright © 2015 Journal of Educational Research and Development.]

本港教育署在幼稚園寫字教育方面曾有明確指示和建議：4歲以下幼兒不可以寫字 (香港教育署，1996)。但很多本港幼稚園、幼兒園以及幼兒中心，在家長和社會的壓力下，主動或被動地過早開展寫字教育，2、3歲的幼兒用他們尚未發育成熟的小手握起沉重的筆。這種做法雖然暫時應付了家長，但其是否對幼兒長遠發展有好處？會否出現拔苗助長的副效應？這令很多幼教同仁憂慮，也令人擔心這樣下去孩子們唯一一點幸福的童年時光也會被剝奪殆盡。針對這一擔憂，本文試圖從理論與實踐兩個層面分析幼兒寫字教育的幾個關鍵性問題，以解幼教同仁心中之疑惑。
[Copyright © 2002 香港教育工作者聯會.]