The current paper examined the effects of A Balanced Reading Approach for Children Always Designed to Achieve Best Results for All (ABRA), a web-based literacy programme developed by the the Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance (CSLP) at Concordia University, on primary school children in Hong Kong. The participants were 249 Primary 1 students from two low social economic status schools in Hong Kong and the two schools were well-matched on many demographic characteristics. All participating students were pre-tested in the fall and post-tested in the following spring. After adjusting for pretest differences, the treatment school scored significantly higher than the controls on three of the six outcome measures at post-tests: phoneme-grapheme correspondence (ES = +0.22, p < 0.05), phoneme segmentation (ES = +0.46, p < 0.00), and nonsense word fluency (ES = +0.22, p < 0.06). Both treatment and control students scored similarly on word reading, listening comprehension, and initial sound fluency. The outcomes of the study provides some promising evidence of the effects of ABRA on Chinese primary students in Hong Kong, especially on the enhancement of phonological skills, thus leading to early success in the formative years of learning English as a Second Language (ESL). Practical implications are discussed.
[Copyright of Education and Information Technologies is the property of Springer New York LLC.]

As one of the essential skills for success in work and studies, English communication is often made a key component in the GE curriculum of tertiary study programmes. In addition to the provision of required English proficiency courses, many tertiary institutions have established English centres of some description to promote English learning on campus. Yet from students' perspective, what kinds of programmes and activities should be offered, and how they feel about these initiatives is not very widely discussed in the existing literature. This paper aims to address these questions with practical experiences gained from a project to establish an English language enhancement centre by one self-financing tertiary institution in Hong Kong. Funded by the Quality Enhancement Support Scheme (QESS), the centre, titled the Centre for Academic and Professional Language Enhancement (CAPLE), was set up in March 2016. Cognizant of the benefits of life-wide learning, independent learning and collaborative peer learning, CAPLE offers a series of workshops and various kinds of English and culture learning activities that adopt these pedagogical approaches. Centre usage figures and user feedback were continuously collected for evaluative purposes. Data collected through student diaries, online surveys, usage records of the online programmes and other resources and a focus group interview showed varying levels of popularity of different types of workshops/activities, suggesting there is a need for programme designers to have a more realistic view about students' actual English learning needs and learning motivation. Recommendations are made accordingly for more economical use of resources.
[Copyright of English Language Teaching is the property of Canadian Center of Science and Education]

Self-efficacy beliefs regarding the teaching of English language in reading, writing, listening, and speaking were assessed in a sample of 55 prospective Chinese teachers who were trained to teach English as a second language in Hong Kong. These teachers reported that their sense of self-efficacy in teaching speaking and writing seemed to go together, whereas their sense of self-efficacy in teaching reading emerged as relatively distinct. Prospective teachers with teaching-practice experience did report significantly higher scores on self-efficacy in teaching speaking-writing than those without teachingpractice experience. Implications of the findings for efforts to enhance teaching performance through enhancing teaching self-efficacy are discussed. The use of information technology such as blog-based teaching portfolio is suggested to provide an avenue through which prospective teachers' self-efficacy beliefs could be closely examined to provide insights into the changes of self-efficacy in relation to teaching effectiveness. Copyright © 2010 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.

The use of English as the language of international communication has increased dramatically and this has been accompanied by a growing trend for the teaching of English as a foreign language (EFL) to young learners all over the world. However, young EFL learners are doubly disadvantaged because of their relatively limited exposure to English as well as their cognitive immaturity. Given that there is a dearth of research-based evidence documenting the teaching and learning of a foreign language by young learners in Asian contexts, this paper draws upon a multiple case study of three Hong Kong kindergarten teachers and examines the pedagogic conditions within which the teaching of English took place. Data were collected through teacher interviews and classroom observations. Constraints and limitations in pedagogical conditions were identified and these were felt to contribute to both a product-oriented pedagogy and relatively low levels of children's engagement in learning English. The product-oriented pedagogy was also recognized for having digressed from the rhetoric of the curriculum guidelines. Challenges facing Hong Kong and its Asian counterparts in teaching English in an EFL setting are highlighted for further research and discussion.
[Copyright © 2013 臺灣師範大學英語文教學中心 & Airiti Press Inc.]

The English and Chinese reading proficiency of 1376 Grade 4 students in 24 Hong Kong primary schools were assessed using measures developed for the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study. Students' parents provided information about home reading activities (HRA) aimed at supporting their children's reading prior to them entering school ("early home reading activities", EHRA) and during Grade 4 ("home reading activities"). Results indicated that EHRA was a stronger predictor of reading performance in both Chinese and English than HRA. Moreover, 'typical' HRA such as reading books, telling stories and singing songs were found to be predictive of reading performance in both Chinese and English. In English, in addition, playing word games or character puzzles were also activities beneficial to reading performance. Together, these results provide evidence for the beneficial effects of traditional early childhood activities at home such as book reading, telling stories and singing songs for reading performance in later primary school in children's first as well as second language.
[© Australian Council for Educational Research 2017]

The integration of popular culture into English language learning has recently been formalised in the Hong Kong New Senior Secondary curriculum, with the development of critical reading indicated as one of the key objectives. Whether and how students respond to popular culture texts is, however, under-researched. The present paper reports findings from a study that investigated how a group of 33 senior secondary (Grade 11) students from three schools representing different levels of academic performance in Hong Kong conducted reading of an authentic print English advertisement. In small groups, the students articulated in Cantonese, their first language, an analysis of the text including its purpose, target audience, and intended impacts. Insights from Stuart Hall's three major decoder positions (dominant reading, oppositional reading, and negotiated reading) were drawn on to conduct a qualitative content analysis of the students' reading. The findings showed that three-quarters of the students irrespective of their English proficiency levels displayed evidence of critical consumption of the text, but many seemed to have constructed oppositional or negotiated reading positions due to their failure to appreciate linguistic creativity, and spontaneous evaluation of the visual images. The authors argue that language curricula in schools should strengthen students' critical multimodal literacies.
[© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group]

One of the key aims of formative assessment in higher education is to enable students to become self-regulated learners (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006). Based on Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick's (2006) framework, this exploratory study investigates which formative assessment practices proposed by them were used by one college EFL writing teacher to facilitate learner self-regulation in a Confucian Heritage Culture (CHC) setting (i.e. Hong Kong) and student perceptions of these practices in relation to self-regulation. Five formative assessment practices were found to be implemented by the teacher to support learner self-regulation. The students seemed to be more positive about teacher-and-student-directed practices than student-directed ones. Suggestions have been provided to maximize the potential of these practices in facilitating learner self-regulation.

English learning is pervasive in Hong Kong kindergartens. Hong Kong children start to learn English as a school subject as early as three years old. However, the practices are diverse and there is a lack of understanding in current practices of English language teaching and its impacts on early literacy outcomes. The present paper will report the development of an observational system for English teaching in the Hong Kong classroom. The system developed by the researchers focused on evaluating the amount of code-based and meaning-based instruction provided to Hong Kong Chinese ESL children and the pedagogical strategies teachers employ in the classroom. Around 30 English lessons from 13 kindergartens located in various geographical districts in Hong Kong were coded using the observation system. The coding results provide information regarding the current practices adopted by Hong Kong kindergartens. School characteristics (e.g. SES, teachers’ qualification, teachers’ nationality) and the pedagogy and teaching content of English language teaching will be discussed. Preliminary findings of the impacts of teaching content on language and literacy skills of around 300 children from the 13 kindergartens will be presented.