In the recent years, students' engagement has been the focus of concern in the US. Various studies have found that students' academic performances were directly affected by students' engagement. In Hong Kong, research on this topic has not yet been found. This research aimed to find out how the behaviors of three primary school English teachers' affect their students' engagements. The teachers were observed on how they presented their lessons on one of the units of the textbooks. Each teacher chose three students as samples of this research. Ways of data collection included: lesson observation, video-taping of classroom teaching, in-class tape-recording of the sample students, and interviewing the teachers and sample students.
The findings of this research perceived the following six behaviors that were of vital importance to students' engagement: (1) Providing learning opportunities for students, (2) Roles of teachers, (3) Student-teacher dialogue, (4) Teachers' demand on students' understanding of what they have been taught, (5) Teachers' self-reflection while teaching, and (6) Teachers' expectations on students.
There are three aspects of engagements: affective engagement, behavioral engagement and cognitive engagement. Students display different levels of engagements due to their teachers' behaviors while teaching. This research found that students' behavioral engagement is associated with superficial affective engagement but does not necessarily correlate with cognitive engagement. On the other hand, cognitive engagement is closely associated with profound affective engagement. It was also found that students' engagement is influenced by the following psychological factors: (1) autonomy, competence and relatedness of the Self Determination Theory, (2) self-efficacy, and (3) students' learning goal orientation. In order to elevate students' engagement, teachers have to provide learning opportunities at a suitable level of difficulties for the students and

The University of Hong Kong, an English medium of instruction (EMI) institution in the Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, has embarked upon an ambitious program designed to strengthen the university's international profile. In support of this aim, a recent review of language education at the university recommended that measures be adopted to encourage the use of English in all courses as well as in professional and social settings (University of Hong Kong, 2004). This study investigates the challenges and prospects for promoting the participation of undergraduate learners in classroom discussion at the university. An ethnographic approach is taken as the study explores the experiences of a group of eight Economics and Finance students and two English language teachers as they participated in oral interaction within their English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classroom. Data were collected throughout the entire EAP course via interviews, audiovisual recording of classroom discussions, classroom observation, documentary analysis, and questionnaires.
The study, grounded in Layder's (1993; 2006) theory of social domain analysis, adopts a multi-level investment perspective on participants involvement in classroom discussion. Learner and teacher investment in such discussion is therefore examined from various perspectives, including the individual, the interactional, and the institutional. The findings challenge previous research, which have portrayed Hong Kong learners as reticent to take part in classroom discussion. These conclusions lead to the development of a theoretical framework that reflects, from these different perspectives, the constraints and enablements to learner investment in oral interaction in the EAP classroom. It is argued that this framework has implications for promoting learner investment in classroom discourse beyond the language classroom. A series of pedagogical recommendations are proposed to promote investment in

In November 1998, the Hong Kong Government published the policy document entitled "Information Technology for Learning in a New Era Five-Year Strategy 1998/99 to 2002/03" and defined the goals and the scope of the development of Information Technology in education in Hong Kong. One of the goals is to encourage using Information Technology (I.T.) in education and to promote students' ability in handling information. As the role of I.T. is becoming more and more important in education, schools themselves have also implemented I.T. to various extents. The main purpose of this study is to explore the impacts of the external environment on the development of I.T. in Hong Kong primary schools and examine also the relationship between the use of I.T. in education and teaching effectiveness in Hong Kong primary schools.
This study uses a quantitative approach to achieve the above purposes. Questionnaires were sent to 823 teachers from 25 Hong Kong primary schools to solicit their views on the impact of I.T. in school education, the use of I.T. education and their perceptions of teaching effectiveness.
The School Environment Constraint Instrument developed by Lam (1989) was adopted to meet the context of Hong Kong primary schools and modified for this study. Two new factors "New Arrivals" and "Language Policy" are used to replace the original factors of 'Ethnicity' and 'Second Language'. The other two research instruments which measured "Information Technology Development" and "Teaching Effectiveness" were developed by the Researcher.
The results of the research indicate that: (1) the "Policy" factor and "Funding" factor had a high, significant correlation with the different aspects of I.T. development of Hong Kong primary schools; (2) a school with well-developed I.T. had a positive significant correlation with "Teaching Effectiveness".
Recommendations have been made for school administrators' consideration in the development of I.T. systems in primary

Collaboration in design has become a geographically distributed and culturally dispersed activity. Increasingly, design educators see the need to prepare young designers for an international market by providing students with skills not only for design but also for intercultural communication.
This thesis investigates how design patterns for facilitating intercultural design education contexts can be identified through qualitative and comparative analysis of a long-term ethnographic study of cross-cultural computer-supported collaborative design learning. The core findings of this research are based on a three-year ethnographic study of intercultural computer-supported collaboration between groups of students from Hong Kong, Korea, Austria and Taiwan. A qualitative research approach was utilized for the discovery of regularities in the observed collaborations, and a comparative research approach was employed to discover similarities and differences across cultural contexts. Data from the first year was analyzed inductively to identify reoccurring themes in design collaboration. This guided the observation of collocated activity and analysis of online conversations in the second year of this study. A map of recurring design solutions was constructed from this analysis. Eleven design patterns were written based on this analysis and presented to designers for evaluation in a pattern workshop. Based on the feedback from this workshop, in the third year of this study an in-depth analysis of computer-mediated interaction between Hong Kong and Korean students, and their local tutors, was carried out. A deductive coding scheme, informed by theories of intercultural and cross-cultural communication research, was employed to guide the analysis and articulation of design patterns for intercultural collaboration.
Within this research, an inductive and deductive methodology for identifying and articulating design patterns was developed. Therein, eleven patterns for intercultural

This study sought to identify how teachers of science in English medium secondary schools in Hong Kong make science content accessible to students through English, the students second language. The strong emphasis on language outcomes in much of the research on late immersion (of which English medium education in Hong Kong is considered an example) indicates that a study which addresses classroom processes may be timely.
The significance of language in immersion education suggested that an awareness by teachers of the part language plays in learning within the curriculum might provide a means by which qualitative differences in the teaching of content could be identified. The study, therefore, attempted to determine whether there are any differences between teachers who are strongly aware of the role of language in learning and those who are weakly aware in the ways they integrate language and content in their teaching to facilitate student learning. Further, it explored how those differences are realised.
A qualitative approach was adopted for the study. A theoretical framework was developed with which to analyse classroom data on the teaching of science through English. The framework was made up of six dimensions describing the integrated teaching of science and the English of science in an immersion context. It was developed from the literature and was further refined as a result of intensive reading and re-reading of lesson transcripts.
Six teachers of science were studied. A questionnaire was used to place each teacher on a language awareness continuum and four were thus classified as strongly language aware and two as weakly language aware. The teachers were observed and recorded teaching the same science topic. Following the lessons, the students were given a test of science which required that they express their understanding in written English. The teachers and some students were also interviewed.
The science test results revealed that students