THE TRANSITION FROM HOME to early childhood education can be stressful for both children and parents. How parents cope with this potentially stressful event affects both the children's adaptation and the parents' lives during the preschooler stage of the family lifecycle. This paper examines how parents respond to their children's adjustment difficulties, particularly a reluctance to attend school, by examining the coping strategies of 29 Hong Kong parents. The parents expressed different kinds of negative emotions regarding their children's reluctance to go to school due to various adjustment difficulties. Parents' coping strategies can be classified as planful coping, seeking social support, accepting responsibilities, distancing, self-controlling and positive reappraisal according to Folkman and Lazarus's Ways of Coping (WOC) framework. The implications of these strategies for how early childhood professionals can support parents are discussed.
[Copyright © 2014 Early Childhood Australia Inc.]

Hong Kong is linguistically complex and diverse with three principal languages: Cantonese, English and Putonghua. A substantial debate on the language policies governing the three principal languages has continued for more than two decades among policy-makers and educators. The political transition in 1997 has greatly affected Hong Kong society, including language education. Since then, the HKSAR government has made a series of language policy reforms trying to create a reasonable balance among the three languages in Hong Kong. The policies of ‘biliteracy and trilingualism’ and ‘mother-tongue teaching’ are two of the most significant in terms of controversy and impact. They are now guiding the curriculum design in Hong Kong language education. The goal of the former policy is to train Hong Kong people to be truly biliterate (written English and Chinese) and trilingual (spoken English, Cantonese and Putonghua). However, Hong Kong primary schools presently do not have an agreed method for the implementation of trilingual education. After a comprehensive historical review of the development of language education in Hong Kong schools, this study aims to find out how the ‘biliterate’ and ‘trilingual’ language policy is currently implemented in Hong Kong primary schools. 155 Hong Kong primary schools participated in a questionnaire survey on how trilingual education is implemented in the schools. The findings suggest that the implementation of trilingual education varied significantly from school to school, and the effectiveness of the trilingual education models varied as well. It is hoped that the findings will help us to gain a better understanding of trilingual education in Hong Kong, and the study could lead to some insightful and theoretical contributions to multilingual education in general.
[Copyright © 2015 Wang and Kirkpatrick; licensee Springer.]

Since the late 1990s, early childhood education in Hong Kong has progressively lounged a series of reforms to raise the quality of early year education. Along with the emphasis on adopting the 'child-centred' concept of children's learning, the Guide to the Pre-primary Curriculum issued in 2006 recommend an integrated approach in the curriculum design. The integrated "holistic" approach calls for a shift of paradigm from the formal didactic teaching of academic knowledge to an informal development of the children through quality teacher-children interactions. Hitherto, small class teaching environment is created via the increase in teacher-student ratio at the start of the 2003-2004 academic year. A review of literature on small class teaching suggested that teacher-children ratio, classroom settings and the relevant pedagogic applications are important ingredients for the philosophical enhancement of the small class spirit. This paper will report some preliminary data collected in a pilot study conducted in two classrooms in a Hong Kong Kindergarten. The findings are reported as case studies which suggest that the spirit of small class teaching is not restricted in an informal teaching environment but in some formal teaching settings in the school as well. Discussion and implications on this understanding will be made.

近年來，隨著社會的發展，香港公眾對於提高學前教育質量有著日益強烈的需求。香港教育統籌委員會提出 “面向21世紀教育藍圖”，呈現了一系列關於香港教育系統的改革計劃，明確指出學前教育是終身學習的基礎。改革中的一個關鍵性舉措是樹立學前教育新文化，這主要通過提升教師專業水平以及加強教育質量保證機制來實現。本文將呈現近年來香港學前教育實踐的背景，重點關注學前教育質量的提高，並概括介紹香港教育統籌委員會的改革計劃。本文將進一步探討香港學前教育在保證質量、課程設置、教師專業發展、財政資助以及家長教育方面面臨的挑戰。
[Copyright © 2007 華東師範大學出版社]