Language in its broad sense refers to a message system communicated from one to another. It is not uncommon for teachers to teach with a specific kind of language to pupils, which creates unequal relations of power, particularly between teachers and pupils in classroom context. In turn, language itself becomes a discourse including the ways teachers speak during PE lessons. This study investigates the language used by two student teachers in PE lessons during field experience in a primary school in Hong Kong. The PE lessons conducted by the participants were video taped and analysed in the aspects of context, teaching process, and most of all, the language used during the lessons. Results indicate that the participants used language to teach and control pupils learning and discipline consciously and unconsciously. As student teachers, their teaching behaviour and performance were much influenced by the school traditions, such as routine training. However, through languages during the process of teaching, they exercised power and control over their pupils on thinking and ways of problem solving. Hidden curriculum such as sexism also existed unconsciously as another discourse in the lessons.

School teachers, in the move of educational assessment reform in Hong Kong, are currently developing their professional competence on making a good use of assessment to enhance their 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 classroom instruction. This research seeks to understand the kinds of protocols of assessment data school teachers perceived as practical information to become useful feedback to their 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 teaching Chinese language subject in Hong Kong. After demonstrations, we interviewed the groups to understand their perceptions on the protocols. Results shows that teachers most value assessment data which can help in identifying students' strength and weakness, assuring test item quality, stimulating reflection on their teaching practice, and turns out to become the foundation for rebuilding their classroom instruction.

In the summer of 1998, 234 Hong Kong student teachers attended commissioned English immersion programmes in Canada, Australia and Britain. Previous Hong Kong-focused research (Crew 1994, MacLennan and Tse 1995, Tse 1997) has indicated that participants gain temporarily in language proficiency but that attitude change is perhaps the most profound result of their overseas experience. Anxiety has been noted as a primary factor in language attainment for Hong Kong student teachers, as has culture shock in UK-based immersion programmes (Crew 1994, 1996). Recent research (e.g. Crew 1997) indicates that major sources of overseas immersion programme anxiety are not directly related to language issues, though the specific anxieties which arise may well be amenable to moderation or resolution by the use of language. The current paper expands on previous work by seeking to identify and compare the cultural and anxiety factors applicable to the more varied societal contexts now available and to report on successful coping strategies employed by participants.
[Copyright © 2000 The Hong Kong Institute of 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.]