Private tutoring is one of the unintended outcomes of high-stakes testing and has become a widespread global phenomenon. It is called shadow education because it mimics the mainstream curriculum. From the critical perspective, this study investigated the role of private tutoring in a context of high-stakes testing through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. It explored 18 Secondary Six (Grade 12) students’ reflections on their learning experiences in private tutoring in Hong Kong for one year. Conceptualized with Freire’s Pedagogy of the oppressed, the findings reveal that while students are being oppressed in the washback of high-stakes testing under neoliberalism, shadow education further oppresses the students by (1) intensifying the “banking” concept of education, (2) teaching as the “authority”, (3) emphasizing performativity and (4) offering “false generosity”. The findings provide implications for potential educational change in contexts where education systems increasingly rely on accountability and selection through high-stakes testing. By problematizing the role of private tutoring through the conceptual lens of oppression, the study calls for research to take a closer look at the impact of shadow education on learners’ experiences in the current neoliberal era. Copyright © 2020 National Institute of Education, Singapore.

In many Asian countries and increasingly in the West, primary and secondary school students receive private tutoring, often in the form of lectures in cram schools. As English is an international lingua franca, many students enroll in English courses after school. Students enrolled in English private tutoring (EPT) are often examination-driven and extrinsically motivated to learn English, but past studies have not examined whether they like EPT lessons. Hence, we integrate motivation and tutoring into a theoretical model of EPT enjoyment at different levels (student, family, teacher, tutoring) and empirically test it with the survey responses of 543 Secondary Six (Grade 12) students enrolled in EPT courses in cram schools. The findings show that most Secondary Six students in Hong Kong like EPT lessons. Family, reasons for tutoring, tutoring, and student attributes are linked to EPT enjoyment. These students are more likely to like EPT if they (a) are in families perceived to have superior financial resources, (b) are not influenced by advertisements or other people to join EPT lessons, (c) attend face-to-face tutoring, (d) have a specific tutor, (e) like the tutor more than their teachers, (f) are interested in English, or (g) have greater English self-concept. The results of this study can contribute to our understanding of which motivation and tutoring factors affect students' enjoyment of EPT and inform EPT improvements. Copyright © 2020 De La Salle University.

This study compares the teaching effectiveness of cram school tutors and schoolteachers of English based on the perceptions of senior secondary students in Hong Kong. It adopts a sequential mixed-methods approach. The result from the online survey (N = 477) indicates that tutors are perceived to be more effective than schoolteachers in all identified aspects of effective teaching. However, the qualitative data from focus group interviews (n = 64) reveals a more complex picture. By problematising students' perceptions with reference to the wider social, cultural and educational context, three themes were generated: (1) students' utilitarian learning orientations in an examination-oriented system, (2) the commodification of education in a consumer culture, and (3) students' immediate psychological needs in the process of learning. This study sheds light on the complex relationship between private tutoring and mainstream schooling and offers implications for policymaking and teaching in the private and mainstream sectors. Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Purpose: This article aims to illustrate from the author's insider perspective the lived experiences of engaging in private tutoring in Hong Kong as a tutee, a tutor, and a researcher and draw implications on several issues arising from the prevalence of shadow education.Design/Approach/Methods: This article adopted an autobiographical narrative approach. Data were collected through the author's memoir of events, stimulated by the tutorial materials he used when he was a tutee and a tutor, his own video-recorded lessons of tutoring, and reflective journals from his research projects.Findings: Various issues are discussed based on the narrative of the author playing different roles in the tutoring industry, including (1) the positive and negative washback on mainstream education, (2) the lack of strict regulation of the quality of tutors and advertisements, and (3) how shadow education may exacerbate education inequality and how some tutorial companies and nonprofit organizations are addressing the issue.Originality/Value: This article, to the best of the author's knowledge, is the only one that discusses the issues of shadow education from an author's own personal experiences as a tutee, a tutor, and a researcher. It illustrates how practices and policies of the private tutoring industry are evolving in Hong Kong from an insider perspective. Copyright © 2019 The Author(s).

Based on Dörnyei's L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS), this study explored senior secondary students' multiple L2 selves when they enrolled in English private tutoring (EPT) courses. Through narrative inquiry, this paper analysed 18 Hong Kong Secondary Six (Grade 12) students' English learning experiences and their motivation for learning English and subscribing to EPT. Each participant completed a questionnaire, wrote three pieces of reflective writing and responded to six individual interviews throughout the year of study. The findings indicated that language learning converged from diverse activities to examination drilling at senior secondary school years. The learners possessed insecure actual L2 selves, revealing a discrepancy with their future L2 selves consisting of dominant ought-to L2 selves and suppressed ideal L2 selves. This study contributes to research in language learning by unveiling EPT learners' formation of L2 selves in a context of high-stakes testing. The findings contribute to the development of the L2MSS by operationalising the actual L2 self, its discrepancy with possible L2 selves, and the interrelationship between ideal and ought-to L2 selves. The study calls for further research to bridge the fields of shadow education and language learning given the significant role EPT plays in shaping learners' out-of-school L2 learning experiences. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Private tutoring has become a widespread phenomenon worldwide, partly due to the global trend of marketisation and commodification of education. Informed by a discursive view of identity and through multimodal discourse analysis, this study aims to unveil part of the shadow education discourse by investigating the identities of 41 English language tutors portrayed in their biographies on the websites of six leading tutorial schools in Hong Kong. The findings suggest that the tutors project identities as (1) an authoritative exam expert, (2) a popular star, and (3) a well-qualified English language teacher. These multiple identities overlap and collectively create an 'exam expert-star-teacher' hybrid identity. The study sheds light on how implicit values and beliefs about shadow education are created and manifested in educational and social discourses, particularly when biography in tutorial advertisements is a prevailing commercial genre with promotional purposes. Copyright © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

In the face of heavy demand for private supplementary tutoring in basic education, the state seems to have adopted a consumerism model in the decentralised governance of mass tutoring, allowing students and parents to select for themselves course information, payment amounts and methods, tutoring dates and times, and physical conditions when buying services from registered cram schools in Hong Kong. In the study reported here, a 3-level cultural analysis of cram schools was conducted from 1998 to 2008 to examine the patterns of mass tuition trends in Hong Kong. The analysis investigated the impacts of such trends, or culture, upon youth values, and implications are drawn for policy making, educational reform, societal movements, and academic recommendations for further research.
[Copyright © 2009 HKFYG.]

In many settings a perplexing scenario is unfolding in which school systems claim to move towards whole-person development while students and parents run in the opposite direction of narrowly defined academic achievement enhanced by private supplementary tutoring. Such tutoring is widely called shadow education because much of its content mimics that of regular schooling. It has long been clearly visible in Asia, and is now increasingly visible elsewhere. This study focuses on school teachers' perceptions of shadow education in the context of a flourishing sector that parallels and to some extent contradicts progressive education reforms. Drawing on 47 in-depth interviews with teachers from 12 secondary schools in Hong Kong, the research found ambivalent views towards private tutoring. This ambivalence reflected intrinsic contradictions between the educational ideals of whole-person development and the function of schooling in social stratification. Such tensions are likely to become increasingly evident elsewhere as commercialised forms of private supplementary tutoring expand.

Adopting a case study approach with multiple data sources, this paper explores the ways in which rapport is built, and its impact on the learning process based on five successive writing support consultations between a native English-speaking (NES) tutor and her second language (L2) tutee in a Hong Kong university. With reference to the prepared coding categories, six strategies that realize the four key elements of rapport management were identified, namely greetings, small talk, the use of qualifiers and mitigation devices, first-person plural pronouns, praises and expressions of empathy, and open-ended questions. These strategies symbolized association, addressed face work and emotional reactions, and encouraged equity in the directive and tutor dominance writing consultations. Motivated by the harmonious relationship, the tutee gradually took a more active role in learning in different ways by asking questions, expressing an opposite view, admitting inadequate knowledge, reflecting on cognitive processes, and initiating small talk. The implicit impact was further reflected in her improved self-rating and the completion of the five consultations. Pedagogical recommendations for tutor training are made.
[Copyright of Language and Education is the property of Taylor & Francis. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2015.1038275]

Despite its rapid expansion in many countries around the world, private tutoring has attracted only limited attention from policy makers and researchers. This is especially surprising in the case of Asia, where high rates of private tuition have been reported. In particular, comparatively few studies have considered the views of the individual stakeholders in private tuition; students, parents, teachers, and tutors. This study addresses this research gap by using in-depth interviews to provide detailed descriptions of the challenges one group of private tutors in Hong Kong confronted as they positioned themselves within the teaching profession. The findings expose and problematize discourses which establish a rigid division between educators providing private tutoring and those in mainstream schools and constrain the capacity of the former to construct their preferred professional identities. It is argued that educational authorities should respond to the growth in private tutoring in ways that overcome the antagonisms that such division can imply for professional relations between educators in private tutoring and those in mainstream schools.
[Copyright © 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.]