"What knowledge, skills and attitude concerning physical education (PE) are of most worth to students in Hong Kong?" This paper tries to review and discuss the values of PE in schools with reference to the development of PE curriculum in Hong Kong. It is assumed that such values are 'subjective' in the sense that they are perceived by PE teachers as means to an end expressed in their curriculum. They are dynamic and changing from time to time. It is also characterised by personal values of PE teachers or the intentions of the government and other organizations. According to Jewett, Bain and Ennis (1995) and Crum (1993), values of PE can be categorised into different frameworks with three major sources of influence, namely PE teachers' value perspectives towards personal or individual development, social-cultural goals and the subject matter content of PE. Some PE teachers believe that personal or individual development is the major concern of their PE curriculum. Cultivating all-rounded development of the students and developing them to become elite athletes or life long participants in leisure and recreational activities are some of the examples. Others concern more on the social-cultural goals of the PE curriculum. These PE teachers concern more on building students' social efficiency and adaptability through fostering desirable traits of cooperation, loyalty and citizenship. Conversely, some want to develop students' independent and critical thinking through PE so that they can become the change agents for a better society. For some practitioners, the subject matter of PE deserves the special attention in formulating the values of PE in schools. 'The education "of", "through" and "about" physical' conceptions explain appropriately different viewpoints of teachers on the subject nature of PE. However, all the orientations mentioned above are not mutually exclusive. Some are sometimes conflicting and confusing in nature. The situation is sometimes complicated by the

Physical education (PE) teachers of Hong Kong are now facing challenges like no other time before. In the current climate of education reform, PE teachers are now encouraged to provide a more holistic education to students, including learning goals related to social development, creativity, imagination, problem solving, as well as intellect. In order to attain these physical education goals, there is a heightened emphasis in the area of dance. However, the Hong Kong education culture stresses the academic subjects and dance is not usually a popular subject, although it is recognized as one of the components of PE. Physical education teachers' unwillingness to teach dance has been attributed to inadequate dance experience, lack of confidence, low interest, limited dance exposure, cultural differences between the East and West, and limited participation in dance training after graduation (Chow, 2001, 2002). Out of the many possible factors that limited dance instruction by PE teachers, teacher self-efficacy may be the most critical one. This study investigated the factors that influence pre-service PE teachers' decision to teach dance. Results provide information that may be used to enhance teacher self-efficacy with regard to teaching dance in Hong Kong.

This presentation will focus on how teacher feedback helps cultivate critical thinking skills and raises awareness in an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course. Analysis is based on data taken from verbal/written exchanges between teacher-student and student-teacher. Samples from students' work and teachers' comments will highlight the effectiveness of the process approach in developing L2 learners' writing skills. Practical issues such as ways of organising individual and group feedback sessions will be addressed. It also argues that dialogic encounters should be gradually scaffolded in order to maximise learning outcomes.

One major endeavour of the educational assessment reform in Hong Kong is to translate the idea of assessment for learning into the school teacher's everyday practice. The idea,assessment for learning, emphasizes that classroom assessment should enable the teacher to give feedback about a student's learning and to obtain feedback which inform his or her own teaching. Both groups of school teachers and teacher educators are concerned with the issue about how to make sense of assessment data and to transform them into feedback useful to learning and teaching. This research seeks to understand the kinds of protocols of assessment data school teachers perceived as practical information to become useful feedback to learning and teaching. We conducted 2 types of protocols using different analysis methods of assessment data (that is, basic item analysis and Rasch model) to represent primary and secondary students' responses to objective test items assessing the competency of reading comprehension of Chinese literatures. We presented the protocols to primary and secondary school teachers who are currently teaching Chinese language subject in Hong Kong. After our demonstrations of the protocols, we interviewed the participant teachers to obtain their perceptions on each type of protocols. Results of the teachers' perceptions are discussed in this paper.

It is widely recognised that teachers' professional development is greatly enhanced through their participation in professional discourse. Professional discourse is a structured form of professional conversation that is widely used in lesson analysis and pre and post-lesson conferencing, within the contexts of mentoring and peer review. In Hong Kong, lesson observation and analysis also arise when conducting Learning Study. In these various contexts, conversation often turns on reconciling different interpretations and understandings of classroom events. When conducting a lesson (teacher talk) and in pre and post-lesson analysis (teacher conversation), meanings are not simply articulated, they are also created. Moreover, the meanings expressed by teachers when both teaching and analysing lessons are not stable; they are in process and change over time. The paper will outline these ideas in detail, with particular emphasis on lesson conferencing, building on the work previously undertaken by one of the authors on the hermeneutics of professional discourse. The conceptual framework discussed in the paper will provide the basis of a research programme that will shortly be undertaken in Hong Kong, as a component of a major government sponsored project conducting Learning Studies in both primary and secondary schools.