This article presents information on 2 international educational effectiveness studies, one completed and the other ongoing. The 2nd study is, to a large degree, a reaction to a methodological problem encountered in the 1st study, the lack of an internationally valid instrument measuring teacher effectiveness. This article presents 4 reasons for conducting the 2nd study (International System for Teacher Observation and Feedback (ISTOF)) and then details the overall work plan for ISTOF-I (2004 - 2006) and ISTOF-II (2006 - 2007). The sample of 20 fully participating country teams in ISTOF is very diverse with representatives from nearly all geographic areas of the world (North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia), many of which have never participated in teacher or school effectiveness research. This article summarizes progress made on the development of the ISTOF protocol, including the generation of components and indicators of teacher effectiveness. In many ways, the study is already a success, due to the diversity of the participating countries and their generation of major parts of the protocol during ISTOF-I. Nevertheless, this article concludes with a discussion of some of the major challenges that the research team will face as it begins ISTOF-II.
[Copyright of Educational Research & Evaluation is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13803610600874067]

Private supplementary tutoring has long been a major phenomenon in parts of East Asia, including Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan. In recent times it has grown dramatically in other parts of Asia and in Africa, Europe and North America. The factors underlying the growth of private tutoring vary, but in all settings it has major implications for learning and livelihood. Families with the necessary resources are able to secure not only greater quantities but also better qualities of private tutoring. Children receiving such tutoring are then able to perform better in school, and in the long run to improve their lifetime earnings. By contrast, children of low‐income families who do not receive such benefits may not be able to keep up with their peers and may drop out of school at an earlier age. Tutoring also of course has a direct impact on the livelihoods of the tutors, providing employment and incomes for a range of professionals and amateurs of different age groups. The dynamics of inter‐relationships are complex, and vary from one setting to another. This paper argues that private supplementary tutoring deserves much more attention from policy makers and researchers.
[Copyright of Compare: A Journal of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057920601024974]

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has been promoted by the European Union as a means to achieve multilingualism. While in Germany and other European countries the trend to use the L2 as a medium of instruction is increasing, in Hong Kong, however, we see a converse development. Many schools switched from English as a medium of instruction (EMI) to mother tongue education.
The German CLIL concept promotes a gradual and cautious switch to L2 for only a few content subjects in the curriculum. The Hong Kong EMI approach introduces L2 after a short bridging period to most content subjects. Although the CLIL and EMI programmes both share the features of a late immersion programme, their approach to language use in classroom discourse frames is different. The current study was designed to examine the processes and effects of language learning in L2-taught content subjects. Based on samples from two history lessons in the German CLIL and the Hong Kong EMI context, classroom interaction was analysed with special focus on teacher/student talk and codeswitching. First results support the claim that constructive processes during classroom interaction are vital elements of language acquisition.
[Copyright of International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/beb465.0]

Conceptions of learning and preferred learning approaches have been suggested to vary cross-culturally. The extent to which learning is 'student-centred' or 'teacher-centred' also appears subject to cultural variation. This has led some to conclude that particular cultures exhibit learning preferences more suited to distance learning than do other cultures. This article examines the strategies that students from varying cultural backgrounds use to manage the experience of the isolation of distance learning. Two distinct isolation experiences emerge that reflect differences in the perceptions of the student-teacher relationship. These, it is argued, can be classified as a 'surrogate teacher' model in the Asian cultures of Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia and a 'student identity' model in Europe.
[Copyright of Open Learning is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0268051032000131035]