This presentation discusses the infusion of IELTS exemplars and standards descriptors into instructional materials to promote assessment for learning. The discussion is based on teachers’ experiences of a Year 2 English course offered in a university in Hong Kong which requires students to attain a specified IELTS standard before graduation. To help students to attain the required IELTS exit requirement, IELTS exemplars and standards descriptors are incorporated into the training materials. Drawing upon students’ responses, this presentation will suggest practical ideas for developing instructional materials by (a) effectively helping students approach and overcome difficulties in comprehending standards descriptors with specific reference to their own language problems, and (b) achieving the above through interactive in-class activities to help teachers use proficiency standards to develop meaningful curricular materials and assessment practices. It is hoped that the outcomes of this project can counterbalance ‘instrumentalism’ (in achieving standards) and ‘learning’ in academic settings where testing is a policy concern. Copyright © 2017 Asia TEFL.

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.

This article will present the findings of an interventionist study designed to examine the effects of oral communication strategy teaching (OCST) on learners’ performance and on strategy use. Two classes in the secondary ESL classroom in Hong Kong participated in the study; one class received 16 hours of OCST and the other served as a comparison group. In weeks 1, 10 and 20, data were collected from the learners’ performance in group work discussions, self-report questionnaires, observations of learners’ strategy use, and stimulated recall interviews. The findings indicate that the treatment class generally outperformed the comparison class. In addition, there was corroborating evidence from the multi-method approach to support the view that young L2 learners tend to rely on ‘bedrock strategies’ in oral communication tasks. The findings will be discussed with respect to explicit and implicit learning and to a match between the cognitive/linguistic demands of strategy use and the learners’ proficiency level. Finally, the distinct advantages of using a multi-method approach to gauging the effects of OCST are appraised.
[Copyright © 2006 Centre for Language Studies of the National University of Singapore.]

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.]

In this seminar we will report the results of two series of investigations into the L2 listening performance of Hong Kong university students, and suggest using partial transcription as a tool for helping learners improve their ability to recognise words in connected English speech. In the first part of the talk, Richard will present findings from two sets of studies, carried out in the first case at HKUST and in the second case with PolyU, HKU and CUHK students, which are among the first to specifically focus on the spoken word recognition of L2 listeners. Both used transcription to provide insights into the ability of Hong Kong learners of English to catch words in connected speech (news broadcasts and documentaries). Results showed that learners at Intermediate level had worryingly high levels of difficulty: even with relatively slow speech rates, this group of learners consistently recognised at most only three out of every four of the 1,000 most frequent words of English – making successful comprehension extremely unlikely. The results suggest that the ability to recognise words (especially frequent ones) in connected speech is a vital prerequisite for comprehension and that too little attention is paid to developing spoken word recognition skills in Hong Kong. In the second part of the talk, Fun will look at the use of a novel methodology (partial transcription) for investigating online processing problems in L2 listening and challenge the widely held assumption that L2 listening comprehension is an interactive process. She will discuss 1) some of the processing problems experienced by L2 listeners; 2) why partial transcription could improve listeners' inferencing skills and their perception of both segmental and suprasegmental speech features; and 3) how partial transcription can be devised for classroom and self-access use. Practical considerations such as material, transcription gap selection and learners' proficiency will also be discussed.