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.

Learning Study, in the form of an action research, has been proved to be an effective platform for school-based teacher professional development in Hong Kong. It is grounded in the Variation Theory developed by Ference Marton. In each Learning Study, teachers of a certain subject in a school work collaboratively with staffs from the Hong Kong Institute of Education to plan and teach a lesson targeting to achieve some important goals and/or to solve some learning difficulties in the curriculum of that subject. This presentation is about a Learning Study of a junior secondary school science topic "Eyes and Vision". In this Learning Study, drawing of ray diagram was identified to be a critical learning difficulty of the students. Activities were then designed based on the Variation Theory. Students were expected to develop the ability to use ray diagrams to describe, explain and predict phenomena about seeing sharp and blurred images through these activities. They could investigate light propagation and the formation of image through one phenomenon without involving advanced knowledge in either reflection or refraction. The whole process of conducting the Learning Study will be reported. It includes the identification of learning difficulties, the planning and the teaching of the lesson and the evaluation of the learning outcomes.

The purpose of this study was to compare attitudes of final year students in teacher preparation program and in-service physical education teachers toward including students with disabilities into regular settings between Hong Kong (HK) and mainland China (MC), and to further examine the influences of attitudes on development of adapted physical education program. Total 152 participants (53 4th year students and 43 in-service teachers) from HK, and 56 students from MC participated in this study. A survey was conducted regarding students' attitudes toward inclusion (type disability can be included, type of experience and skills they need for inclusion), and opinions and concerns about inclusion (open questions). The results of survey indicated that both students and in-service teachers in HK and MC philosophically support inclusion, however, there were many concerns and different opinions regarding inclusion when they answered open-end questions. For question #1 "Students with disabilities should be taught in RPE classes" 65% (HK) and 62% (MC) students disagreed. For question #3, "Students with severe disabilities should be taught in separate classes (APE classes)", 77% (HK) and 85% (MC) agreed. The survey indicated that students from HK and MC thought special school and teachers with special training will provide better education for students with disabilities than general teacher. Survey results also indicated from question #13, "to be prepared to teach students with mild to severe disabilities, it is important that I receive training on activities that includes ideas on lesson planning for a variety of abilities levels", that 95.5% students from both HK and MC agreed and strong agreed on "need more academic preparation" for inclusion. There were no significant difference between 4th year students and in-service teachers on these items. Other results indicated that, in addition to government policies, attitudes and lack of special education training for current teachers

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.

Within the core curriculum of primary education, the standard of both Chinese and English, especially writing ability, has attracted much attention of educators, parents and the public. Experienced educationists involved in Chinese language teaching and assessment have an opinion that young people's abilities in reading and writing have dropped in recent years. It might be a consequence came along with compulsory education as there is a great increase of individual differences among pupils that makes teaching and learning very difficult. There is an urgent need to find ways to make up the gap and guarantee at least a minimum educational attainment of all pupils. As art is a core subject in primary schools in Hong Kong, this study aims to examine the effect of art appreciation in art lessons on Chinese writing ability in some primary 3 pupils in a Chinese community.