The English verb BE, with its complicated forms and multiple functions, has posed great learning difficulties for learners of English both as the first and a second language. Most previous studies on the acquisition of BE have only examined a small number of participants and used data from experimental tasks, which have failed to provide a full picture of how BE is acquired and used by learners. By adopting a corpus-based approach, this study presents a fuller picture of the forms and functions of BE in the interlanguage grammars of Chinese learners of English.
Two learner corpora were used in this research, namely, Hong Kong Baptist University Interlanguage Corpus (HKBUILC) and Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), consisting of English essays written by students from Hong Kong and Mainland China, respectively. Three subcorpora of CLEC (i.e. ST2, ST3, ST4) were adopted, representing Chinese learners at three different English proficiency levels. To obtain a comprehensive distribution of interlanguage BE, all the tokens of BE, including non-target-like, overgenerated BE, as in " Mary was lost the necklace she borrowed from her friend ", and omission of BE, as in "My mother would O angry with me", were annotated with respect to their syntactic and semantic properties. The data were then retrieved type by type for examination by using WordSmith, a concordancing software.
To account for the variable use of BE in learners' interlanguage grammars, this study further investigated a few factors that may influence the production and omission of BE, such as the following linguistic distinctions: (1) copular vs. auxiliary BE; (2) finite (am, is, are, was, were) vs. nonfinite (be, being, been) BE; (3) stage-level vs. individual-level predicate types (Carlson, 1977); (4) different post-BE constituents · · e.g. ergative vs. unergative verbs (Perlmutter, 1978); and (5) the differences between L1 and L2 (i.e. English BE vs. Mandarin Shi/Cantonese Haih).
The concordancing

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

Nowadays, Hong Kong students face considerable challenges to their health. Young people are potential civic leaders and parents of tomorrow. They should acquire understanding and moral appreciation of health concepts. A student's health is influenced by interaction with family, peers and the media among others. In this study, the school and the family considered as they are the two major sources of health education support for students.
Findings in this and other local research show that the fragmented school curriculum leads to a lack of comprehensive school health education programs. Health education in Hong Kong is not a separate subject. Health elements are acknowledged in General Studies for primary schools and Integrated Science as well as a number of elective subjects in secondary schools. In addition, Hong Kong lacks comprehensive health education training for school teachers and parents. A forthcoming new senior secondary curriculum will include some health education elements in the core subject Liberal Studies, however students should be exposed to health education earlier, as major health related habits and beliefs develop during the adolescent and pre-adolescent years.
The health education needs of students were investigated by reviewing two comprehensive surveys in 1996 and 2000 for primary and secondary students respectively, carried out using versions of a Health Related Behavior Questionnaire (HRBQ) originating from the United Kingdom, but adapted for the Hong Kong situation. The outcomes reflected that students may generally need to be offered better health education for a more healthy life-style.
Medium scale survey research was adopted here to investigate the awareness of parents and teachers for health topics to be taught within the curriculum and their confidence on teaching or talking about health issues with young people. A total of 2,493 parents and 205 teachers from 22 primary and 19 secondary schools were surveyed. Results showed

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

This thesis examines the history of English education at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) from 1913 to 1964. English literary studies, as a nationalistic academic discourse in England, was an iconic subject in particular for introducing English values and traditions at this colonial "British" university. A critical study of its disciplinary history at HKU raises questions about the impact of colonialism, imperialism and nationalism on the subject and the University at large.
This study employs a mixture of thematic exposition and historical narrative. Thematically, a macroscopic approach was adopted to contextualize the thesis within a broader framework of the history of English literary studies in Britain. University archival materials, staff and student publications and public records were consulted for an overview of the teaching and learning of English in this English-medium university.
Chapter 1 gives an overview of the national significance of the discipline in Britain and its expected roles in the Commonwealth, in relation to the objectives of the English Association founded in 1907. In Chapter 2, the distinctive nature of HKU as a British secular colonial institution is highlighted through a brief set of comparative studies with other western colleges and universities in China. Chapter 3 reconstructs aspects of the first fifty years of the English Department, particularly the period (1920-1951) when it was headed by R. K. M. Simpson. Simpson stressed the interdisciplinarity of English literary studies, and emphasized that English was a gateway to western civilization and culture or "general knowledge". This undercut the general belief that English literary studies merely expounded "Britishness" or "Englishness", and widened its appeal to students in Hong Kong by presenting it as an aid to the acquisition of western knowledge. Chapter 4 is concerned with the practicality and ideology of English Studies as a branch of Arts education. While humanities

This study explores the changes in the conceptions of pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1986'0) of student teachers during training. The focus of geographical education in Hong Kong is shifting from imparting knowledge to developing skills of geographical enquiry, requiring geography teachers to rethink their pedagogical content knowledge to reflect this change of emphasis. This poses a particular problem for student teachers with limited understanding of what is involved. In the transition from training to full time teaching, geography student teachers undergo and must undergo changes in their individual understanding about planning and conducting lessons.
The aims of this study were: (I) to explore the pattern and variations of student teachers' conceptions of pedagogical content knowledge for teaching secondary school geography; (2) to identify the factors influencing thinking and changes in conceptions; and (3) to develop a schema to synthesise the development of their geographical pedagogical content knowledge. A qualitative-interpretive research approach, adopting a phenomenographic perspective, was used. The data came from recursive, in-depth interviews with three student teachers conducted at various points during the two years of their training.
The study demonstrated that the conceptions of the student teachers shifted in varying ways and to varying degrees during training, as their pedagogical content knowledge grew. Conceptions of pedagogical content knowledge were viewed in terms of teachers' use of concepts to explain phenomena, their choice of teaching methods in relation to pupils and images of teaching. The three teachers exhibited seven conceptions of pedagogical content knowledge, ranging from the simple transmission of text to the development of structured ideas appropriate to pupil understanding, and the integration of content and method. Their conceptions were influenced by a number of factors, including their own past learning,

The study of Individual Differences in Second Language Acquisition has long been an established research area. However, researchers have often worked in separate areas, for example, motivation, anxiety and learning strategies. Their studies have enriched our knowledge of the mechanisms in shaping Individual Differences, yet, very little is known about their developmental nature. In another area of Second Language Acquisition research, studies focusing mainly on learners in target-language communities, indicate that learners voice their individual differences through the construction of second language identities. These studies primarily focused on adult language learners in target language communities and yet little is known about pre-tertiary level learners studying a second language in the regions in which they have grown up.
This study was designed to explore the development of individual differences of Hong Kong English learners. Adopting a qualitative research method, ten learners from age 8 to 18 (5 females and 5 males) were interviewed three times over a two-year period. The interviews were scheduled to match the learners' transitions across key learning stages, for instance, from primary to secondary school, and from secondary school to tertiary institution. The data were analyzed in a two-tier system: narrative analysis and the analysis of narrative. The findings were presented through the ten language learners’ stories and a thematic analysis on domains of learning: home, school and out-of-class.
Findings show that Hong Kong English learners emphasized different realms of learning during different stages of their learning. Second, as learners matured, their communities of comparative others expanded and their conceptualizations of being different from their comparative others were refined. Third, the learners processed their learning experiences into future language learning orientation. Finally, participants developed their individual differences

The present study attempted to address the paucity of developmental data on English reading and spelling development among Chinese English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners. English reading and spelling development among Chinese ESL learners in Hong Kong was examined in a one-year longitudinal study covering three developmental periods: Kindergarten to Grade 1, Grade 2 to Grade 3, and Grade 4 to Grade 5. One hundred and fifty five participants were tested on three types of cognitive-linguistic measures (rapid naming, phonological processing, and visual-orthographic processing) and language proficiency measures (English reading, English spelling and Chinese reading). Three major patterns of results were identified. First, the relationships between cognitive-linguistic skills and English proficiency measures differed among Chinese ESL learners of different proficiency levels. Previous research examining the significance of visual-orthographic and phonological skills to English reading and spelling development among Hong Kong Chinese ESL learners has yielded inconsistent results. On one hand, findings in some studies among kindergarteners and Grade 1 students demonstrated the predominant role of phonological skills to English reading and spelling development (Chow, McBride-Chang, & Burgess, 2005; McBride-Chang & Ho, 2005; McBride-Chang & Kail, 2002). On the other hand, the study by Leong, Tan, Cheng and Hau (2005) among Grade 4 – 6 students showed that visual-orthographic skills were of greater significance than phonological skills in predicting English proficiency. Since the participants in these studies were from different age groups, differences in results may simply reflect differences in age or ‘stages’ of reading and spelling development among the participants. Findings in the present study did confirm this speculation: phonological skills were of particular importance to English reading and spelling development among younger participants while the significance

In this rapidly changing health care environment, practitioners and educators need to be flexible thinkers and skilled in clinical reasoning. They need to develop divergent approaches to solutions to complex, ill structured problems. Ill-structured problems in health care are problems that are not clearly delineated in that the nature of the problem, intermediate steps and goals are often unknown at the referral and initial interview stages of intervention. The clinical reasoning used to understand and solve this type of problems requires more than just guessing, ignoring, appealing to authority, or using rote protocols (Facione & Facione, 1996). Students need to develop these skills of reasoning, establish the connection between theory and practice, and apply these skills in client intervention. My interest in the development of clinical reasoning and reflective practice grew out of a particular concern for discovering how we can facilitate students to develop these skills beyond the technical rational approach that has been adopted in the past. Thus the purpose of this qualitative research is to explore the clinical reasoning and thinking of occupational therapists and students in Hong Kong within the context of the local culture. I used an action research approach informed by grounded theory. This involved a dynamic interaction between my research, teaching, and reflection in constructing and generating propositions, thus I incorporate insights about clinical reasoning development into my teaching and my teaching informs my research development. I incorporate the literature to substantiate and expand my understanding of clinical reasoning development and constructivist approaches to learning. I refer to clinical reasoning strategies that correlate with my study and suggest relationships. I discuss methods I have developed for promoting the learning of these clinical reasoning skills by our occupational therapy students. The teaching and learning strategies reflect