English is an important language in Hong Kong, an international city located on the southern coast of the People's Republic of China that, for over 150 years to 1997, was a British colony. This paper describes and analyses changes in teaching methodologies in the English language curriculum formally proposed for Hong Kong junior secondary schools from 1975 to the present day, to study how the curriculum developments reflect interrelated social, political, economic, and cultural factors of the period and the ideology in educational circles that was pre-eminent at the time. It finds that, while the rhetoric of the curriculum has changed in accordance with shifts in socio-economic conditions, the curriculum content and pedagogical approaches implemented in the classrooms have proved more constant across time. The paper suggests some explanations for the resultant curricula tensions.
[Copyright © Lulu Press Inc.].

School-based Assessment (SBA) in English Language is a new core component recently included in the Hong Kong university entrance public examination. It goes together with the promotion of an assessment for learning culture, in which enhancing students' learning is the major concern. This initiative marks an important and ambitious change in examination policy and school practice. Besides its assessment function, feedback forms a prominent tool in facilitating student progress in learning. It is important to understand students' perspectives towards feedback as students' ability to learn from feedback relates to their capacity to make sense of and apply feedback to further their learning. This study looks at students' perceptions of feedback in SBA and whether students react to feedback as a means to 'feed-forward'. The data were gathered from forty-five Form 5 (Grade 11) students in 3 schools through student focus groups and semi-structured interview with teachers. Findings suggest that students did not react in the same way to assessment feedback. Not all students had the strategies to effectively collect, organize and use feedback. The findings suggest that it is through mutual construction of achievement and improvement that students can become active participants in the process of classroom assessment and feedback.
[Copyright © Malaysian English Language Teaching Association (MELTA)].

The value of student voices in dialogues about learning improvement is acknowledged in the literature. This paper examines how the views of students regarding School-based Assessment (SBA), a significant shift in examination policy and practice in secondary schools in Hong Kong, have largely been ignored. The study captures student voices through a survey of 423 Secondary 5 students and interviews with 45 students in 3 schools concerning the use of SBA in the high-stakes assessment for the English Language subject. Results suggest a wide range of student perceptions of, and responses to SBA and related feedback. In general, students indicated that they did not appreciate SBA and were unable to capitalise on the feedback. The paper argues that the intentions of SBA can be threatened if these negative tendencies are not addressed through teacher education, and calls for a dialogic model that allows student participation in debates about learning improvement.
[Copyright © 2015 Australian Research Council.]