Reflecting on a personal experience of 'pre-professional' university education and reluctant engagement with Cultural Studies as an academic project, this article examines the now ambiguous role of undergraduate education under neo-liberal management regimes. Arguing that a 'new class politics in knowledge' is emerging with the transnational policy-sharing and international student exchange schemes with which diverse governmental cultures are responding to globalization, Morris suggests that the undergraduate classroom is becoming a 'frontier' of struggle over the future. Teaching cultural studies to undergraduates in a liberal arts environment is one way in which the discipline's emphasis on local knowledge can be put to institutionally creative uses.
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Science fiction in language classes can be very motivating for students. The stories frequently contain social dilemmas and conflicts. Such reading demands personal responses from readers. A college EFL course using science fiction texts and films can help students whose imminent concern is not only language proficiency, but also the culture of an English-speaking world. This paper presents two responses in the author's EFL classes on helping students find joy in reading and thereby enhancing language skills through different activities, including the use of films. It was found that a lecture approach would not favour some Hong Kong students who have not had any literature training. On the other hand, a more student-oriented approach which values students' opinions made a significant difference. Such information is useful to other EFL programmes in English-speaking countries, and to an introductory literature course where there are EFL members in class.
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Despite the fact that Hong Kong is now a part of China, there are differences between Hong Kong and the main land, especially in terms of the education system, school environment, and learning culture,and learner proficiency level of English. Based on interviews with ten secondary school teachers, the paper discusses the difficulties caused by the recent influx of children from China into Hong Kong. Firstly, there are difficulties for the immigrants themselves. They have to search for a school that will accept the children, and the children are often rejected because their English is not good enough. Secondly, there are difficulties for the classroom teacher. Added to the problems of teaching through English,there are now additional problems with the Chinese children, such as different first languages and no single lingua franca. And there are difficulties for the schools, for example, caused by the lack of systematic admission procedures, and insufficient support for schools and teachers in this respect.The paper makes a number of observations and recommendations that may help to alleviate the situation.
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Studies of language issues in postcolonial Hong Kong are abundant. While the majority is concerned with the language policy and medium of instruction, there seems to be insufficient discussion on the subject matter of our English lessons, which, this paper argues, are ideology-ridden. Following the tradition of critical discourse analysis and ideological studies (see van Dijk, 2005; Luke, 1994), this study attempted to explore how a habitual form of communication, teacher talk in this case, was utilized as a vehicle for young children to "[learn] the taken-for-granted aspects of lived reality" (Hasan, 1996, p. 137), and what attributed to the creation, transmission and maintenance of this dominant culture/ideology in the society, resulting in narrowly-defined subject matter for the young children in the classrooms observed. The study started with a description of lexicosyntactic items in the teacher talk via a corpus approach, and moved to an interpretation/explanation of the linguistic texts in the light of the overall sociopolitical and cultural context in Hong Kong where the teacher talk was situated.
[Copyright of Critical Inquiry in Language Studies is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15427587clis032&3_6]

In this paper, I analyse pupil-teacher dialogue, in a mixture of English and Cantonese, from a segment of a Form 2(Grade 8, 13-14yrs) English reading lesson. The lesson was video taped in a working-class school in Hong Kong, and the excerpt is taken from a larger corpus of similar lesson data videotaped in the class over three consecutive weeks. The analysis shows how these Cantonese children, with limited English, succeeded in subverting the reading lesson, which was based entirely on information extraction tasks.Instead, they negotiated their own preferred comic-style narratives by cleverly making use of the response slots of the IRF (Initiation-Response-Feedback) discourse format used in the lesson. Thus they achieved genuinely creative responses, in spite of the curriculum. The implications for teaching are discussed.
[Copyright of Language, Culture and Curriculum is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07908319908666585]

Enquiry teaching approaches are widely considered as more useful than didactic approaches for the development of environmentally responsible behaviour. This paper is a report of an empirical study on the validity of this belief with reference to higher-ability and lower- to medium-ability groups drawn from geography classes at the Advanced Level in Hong Kong. The hypotheses were that, taken together, enquiry approaches are more effective than didactic approaches for the development of environmentally responsible behaviour in both the short and long terms for students as a whole, and for students within the same range of academic ability. A quasi-experimental control group design was used for selecting students and classes from schools in the territory. A questionnaire survey and a series of interviews were conducted to collect data about students' behaviour before and after they were taught a people-environment topic with a didactic approach or an enquiry approach. The results suggest that the students on the whole were not behaving as positively for the environment as their peers in other countries. For both the higher- and the lower- to medium-ability classes, those who were taught with an enquiry approach were behaving positively in more areas than those who were taught with a didactic approach in both the short and long terms. This trend could be attributed to their greater attention to critical thinking, positive behavioural changes, and the development of internal locus of control, while society as a whole was still largely apathetic to personal efforts for improving environmental quality. To further enhance the effectiveness of enquiry for the development of environmentally responsible behaviour, it is suggested that teachers should give more attention to the elements of concern and empathy in the classroom. Improvements in teacher education and training and in the guidelines for teachers, restructuring and revision of environmental education in schools, providing

Students in the Physiotherapy Programme carried out a group project in their final year of studies. The objectives of the project were that the students learn and appreciate the process and activities involved in research, acquire deeper understanding of a topic in their professional interest, learn to work as a team, manage their own time, collaborate with others and produce a meaningful report. In the case of group work, usually the written report is assessed and the same mark is given to all members. Sometimes the supervisors' and group members' assessment of the members' involvement and participation in the project, oral presentation or viva voce contributes a small portion to the final grade of each student. This practice is limited to the assessment of the outcome of the group effort and does not reflect the process of learning by individual members. Portfolio assessment of learning involves the students themselves reflecting on and evaluating their learning and also allows teachers to evaluate individual students' learning in group tasks. In this paper, the implementation of the portfolio assessment, the criteria for the assessment of the portfolios and the students' opinions on the portfolio assessment are discussed.
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This paper examines the issue of social structure and individual agency in language learning through the life histories of three young engineering graduates in Hong Kong. English is identified as an important form of cultural capital, which to a considerable extent determines the development of the three individuals, each of whom comes from a modest family background. In spite of the undeniable role of cultural capital (a product of social structure), examples of individual agency, in the form of the degrees of "investment" made in their language learning, and the application of "creative discursive agency" (which is to a large extent not a result of the official school curriculum) can be seen as influential on the development of the three young men. The discussion section of the paper considers the relative importance of social structure and individual agency in language education in a post-colonial society such as Hong Kong and the roles of "investment" and "creative discursive agency". It argues that in order to tilt the balance in favor of agency over structure and to encourage more 'investment" on the part of learners, more attention needs to be given to creating opportunities for "creative discursive agency" in and outside the classroom.
[Copyright of Critical Inquiry in Language Studies is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15427580802286173]

Addressing the needs of students with learning difficulties in the mainstream English classroom in Hong Kong is a major challenge for a range of reasons, including a lack of research into the topic. This narrative suggests that such students are likely to be experiencing difficulty in a number of subject areas, and that a collaborative approach is an effective way of designing strategies to help them. This narrative further reports on an action research project, which has begun the task of developing strategies to meet the needs of this group of students and their teachers.
[Copyright of English Teaching: Practice & Critique is the property of Universidad del Zulia.
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