Education in colonial Hong Kong was basically apolitical in nature. Civic education was introduced as a social control mechanism to reflect colonial heritage, and emphasizes the passive, obedient and law-abiding role of citizens, and prevents the development of nationalism and indigenous cultural identity. However, in response to the Joint Declaration, there was a pressure for the Government to prepare pupils to become competent citizens of the Special Administrative Region (SAR). However, various research findings reflect that young people are apathetic in political and community affairs, weak in basic civic knowledge and social awareness. In response to the re-definition of the national identity status of Hong Kong citizens, there is an urgent need to cultivate the sense of belonging of the younger generation toward the SAR as well as the PRC as a whole. The author believes that even after reunification, civic education should not be overlooked as an important educational element in tertiary education. This element should compliment the academic subjects offered by various departments and be integrated in the themes of personal development programs offered by the student affairs office in tertiary education settings. Civic education programs, either co-curricular or extra-curricular in nature, should focus on both nationalistic and democratic themes through the adoption of a participatory-oriented approach, so that students could be provided with ample opportunities to participate in the decision-making process on issues directly affecting their well-being. Arguments for and against this standpoint are presented in the context of the Hong Kong educational system.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03055699997918]

This article examines the differences between the formally stated aims of education and the implementation of the school curriculum in order to show the divergence between what is initiated and what emerges as school practice. This implementation problem is examined from the policy-makers' and teachers' perspectives, with specific reference to physical education as a school subject in Hong Kong. First, it examines the existence and intention of educational policy towards curriculum as established by policy-makers. Second, the implementation process is evaluated from the teachers' perspective by employing a framework adopted by Cuban (1998) that utilized effectiveness, popularity, fidelity, adaptability and longevity. The data are derived from a case-study of a physical education programme that included document analysis, and interviews with teachers, parents and students. The case-study provided a subjective perspective of teachers and their work, while the framework assisted in demonstrating the absence of cohesion between the various government agencies. The resulting fragmentation of ideas leading to confusion and frustration for teachers also indicates that longevity and adaptability are likely to be the most constructive criteria for the assessment of curriculum change.
[Copyright of Curriculum Journal is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0958517022000014718]

Two interactional strategies explicitly taught to learners of English in Hong Kong are how to check that the hearer understands what you are saying as you communicate and, conversely, how to check that you have understood another speaker's message. The forms of these strategies that are taught in Hong Kong schools are fairly limited. This study seeks, through examining authentic spoken discourse in the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE), to determine the ways in which these strategies are linguistically realised in real life communication, compared to the intuitions of materials writers that find their way into school textbooks. The findings suggest that more awareness of the realities of language use would be of benefit to textbook writers and teachers, enabling them to incorporate a wider and more accurate range of forms into their teaching materials, in order, in turn, to foster a more accurate awareness of language and language use in their learners. The approaches of corpus-driven research and data-driven learning are useful; through these, language learners can also become language researchers themselves, engaging themselves in the examination and analysis of corpus data.
[Copyright of Language Awareness is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/la455.0]