Recent reform in the Hong Kong senior secondary education has awakened the need for a balanced and comprehensive learning experience in the academic, vocational, organizational, social service, arts and sports domains to prepare students for employment, for learning and for life. Following on from its recommendation, the Education and Manpower Bureau (EMB) launched a programme—the Career-Oriented Diversified Curriculum (CODC) in 2003, renamed the Career-Oriented Curriculum (COC) in early 2004, with the purpose of providing students with the opportunity to explore their possible directions for further study, and to fulfil their career aspirations. This study attempts to examine the effectiveness of, and the issues involved in, the first phase of implementing a CODC programme in a class of 32 senior Secondary 4¹ students from 19 different schools. The results suggest that providing a diversified career-oriented curriculum is an alternative way to widen a student's learning horizon. Course providers and students agreed that the participants enjoyed the CODC pilot programme more than they did mainstream subjects. They also found that the programme was useful and relevant for future employment.
[Copyright of Journal of Vocational Education and Training is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13636820600591529]

This article explores how Hong Kong Chinese engineering students with low English language proficiency manage to cope with their lectures given in English. An ethnographic case study approach was used with multiple sources of data triangulated to provide a picture of the lecture event from both the students' and the lecturer's perspectives. One of the outcomes of the study, as described in this article, is that lectures have specific genres and that these genres need to be seen as more than linguistic events. By way of a case study into lecturer behaviour/intention and students' perceptions, lectures can be viewed within the wider, socially constructed context.
[Copyright of Studies in Higher Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075070701685163]

Background This was a small-scale study conducted in Hong Kong Chinese language classes, based on the research in cognitive strategy instruction.
Purpose This study aimed to explore whether Chinese language teachers were able to develop their own school-based strategy instruction programme through collaborating with the researcher.
Programme description The school-based programme was mainly adapted from a Chinese reading strategy instruction programme that was developed by the researcher. It aimed to enhance students' reading comprehension through direct teaching on different reading strategies.
Sample A total of 205 grade 7 students and six teachers from one secondary school in Hong Kong participated in the study. One of the teachers and six students from his class were specially invited to participate as target subjects in an in-depth investigation.
Design and methods This study adopted quantitative methods, including a reading comprehension test and questionnaire, and qualitative methods, including think-aloud measures, interview and observation in programme evaluation.
Results Findings of the study generally suggested that the school-based programme was implemented quite smoothly in the regular Chinese language lessons, and most of the students had better performance on their strategy use and reading comprehension after receiving the programme. While the findings provided preliminary support for developing a school-based strategy instruction programme in Hong Kong Chinese language classes, some problems in changing Chinese language teachers' instructional approach are also discussed.
Conclusions This study explored the possibility of developing a school-based strategy instruction programme in Chinese language classes. Due to the small scale and exploratory nature of the study, however, certain limitations of the research design of this study should be noted.
[Copyright of Educational Research is the property of

Hospitality educators have long been emphasizing the importance of training their students with the appropriate skills that are required by the industry. Although previous studies have shown different degrees of success for hospitality management educators to achieve this goal, there is no prior research that examines the relationship of Information Technology [IT] education and industrial applications from an education institute's perspective. This paper provides a linkage of the latest IT applications to the Hong Kong hotel industry with IT training in different degree and subdegree programs offered at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University [PolyU]. An attempt to make this connection is essential for PolyU in providing Hong Kong with the preferred graduates for the local hospitality industry.
[Copyright of Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10941660108722093 ]