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.

Amidst the various demands created by curriculum reforms in Hong Kong, the core business of schools - 'high quality teaching and learning' - has become the focus of attention. Teachers and schools are vested with the responsibilities to put the reform ideals into practice. Schools are accountable for improving student learning outcomes, the empowerment of teachers through mentoring, peer review and appraisal, and turning themselves into learning organisations. This paper describes how Learning Study, which initially started as a modest project to find ways to cater for individual differences in mainstream schools in Hong Kong, became a powerful tool for schools to achieve the aims mentioned above. We did this in a series of projects by using Learning Study as a major component of a mentoring system, which resulted in the creation of learning communities in schools, with a focus on teaching and learning. Such a system benefited all teachers involved, both novice and experienced. Starting with only two schools in 1999, schools in the Learning Study network rapidly expanded to over 100 in 2004, and in the next three years, at least another 120 schools will join the network. The success of Learning Study in Hong Kong will be analysed under the following factors: its conceptual framework, methodology, partnership with higher education institutions, positioning, reform context and culture, and dissemination strategy. Its potential in moving towards improving the status of the profession as a whole will also be discussed.

This paper reports a lesson learned from an initial attempt of incorporating ICT into ordinary module teaching of Chinese linguistics in a teacher education programme. In the teaching and learning process, student teachers were found strongly motivated by online exercises but were not interested in using other online facilities. Feedback from the module participants on the reasons underlying the behaviour patterns identified were collected through focus group interviews at different stages of the module. Findings indicate that poor computer literacy in Chinese, frequent contact with other participants and the lecturer and learning styles all hindered the participants from responding to online discussion and sharing. To optimize the use of e-learning facilities in supporting the study of the same module, the participants suggested that more sensible and authentic online activities are needed. Educators interested in adopting e-learning need to plan and structure more tactically in establishing a context for deep online learning.
[Copyright © 2004 The Association for Advancement of Computing in Education.]

Studies on cognitive process pose a breakthrough in the research of writing in recent decades. Most of them are first language studies and concentrate on the stage development of the process writing, that is to observe the behavioral level of performance of the student. However, related research in helping student aware of improving his writing skills right at the moment of composing is still lacking. This exploratory study is undertaken to investigate the transformation strategies of spoken Cantonese to written English by secondary students in Hong Kong. Students who started extended writing in Form I will be studied, and the major method to gather data is think-aloud---protocol analysis. The subjects will be asked to write a narrative essay that he is familiar to. The whole writing process will be audio-taped, and the resulting protocol will be transcribed and analyzed in comparison with the text produced. The think-aloud protocol is the intended representation of the thought of the subject during writing, while the written text is the executed representation. The discrepancies of the two representations involve the process of transformation by the subjects during writing. With the knowledge, we could have more insights on locating areas to help students the learning of second language to improve the proficiency, on the issue of medium of instruction, and on striking a better balance of our language policy as well. Some possible pedagogical implications are presented.
[Copyright © 2000 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

When educators and researchers are talking about, studying or applying IT in education in many parts of the world, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government launched a five-year IT education strategy. It aims at applying IT comprehensively across the curriculum that within ten years, all teachers and secondary 5 graduates will be able to work competently with IT tools. The strategy advocated a big step forward from the existing situation as most of the primary schools have not yet involved any elements of IT in their curriculum. This survey aimed to find out the teachers' readiness and attitude towards IT in art education in local primary schools.

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.