There is a growing consensus that schools and practising teachers can, in collaboration and/or in partnership with higher education institutions, make valuable contributions to initial and continuous teacher development, specifically when teachers can see how their efforts result in improved student learning and achievement. Learning Study, a Hong Kong version of the Japanese Lesson Study, was developed and used as a tool in a three-year project (2000 - 2003) for improving teaching and learning. Learning Study, which is built on a school-university partnership model, and is grounded in a theoretical framework of variation (Marton & Booth, 1997), was found to be powerful for teachers' professional development. In four years' time, Learning Study has spread from two primary schools to over a hundred primary and secondary schools, and over a hundred Learning Studies had been developed. Learning Study was also used in mentoring to facilitate the forming of a "learning community", to supplement the one to one mentor-mentee model, where the professional growth of all teachers involved was enhanced. In this symposium, we will illustrate how learning communities can be facilitated through engaging teachers in action research cycles of Learning Studies, in which teachers are empowered to learn from their students, from each other and from research as well.

As it entered the second decade of the postcolonial era, Hong Kong had undergone significant socio-economic changes which had impacted students' perceptions of cultural identity and their language attitudes. This study, conducted in 2009, reports on an investigation into the related perceptions of the postcolonial generation who grew up in Hong Kong after the change of sovereignty. A total of 1265 questionnaires were analysed and group interviews were conducted with a sample of 48 respondents. Despite the outstanding achievements of China in the past decades, results indicated that the majority of the informants still retained a strong local identity while only a small percentage demonstrated identification with the nation. Although the different identity groups converged considerably on their attitudes towards Cantonese (the local language) and English (language of the coloniser), they differed significantly on their attitudes towards Putonghua (the national language of China). Yet, the generally positive attitudes towards all three languages offer evidence of support for an ongoing process that fosters multilingualism and multiple identities.
[Copyright of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2010.539692]

This article examines the relation between social class and language attitudes through a triangulated study that analyses the attitudes of 836 secondary school students from different socioeconomic backgrounds toward the 3 official spoken languages used in postcolonial Hong Kong (HK; i.e., Cantonese, English, and Putonghua). The respondents were divided into 3 social class groups (viz. middle, lower-middle, and working class), according to their parents' occupations and levels of educational attainment. This particular group of students started its secondary school education when the mandatory Mother Tongue Education Policy was just implemented after China resumed sovereignty over HK. Data were collected through a questionnaire survey and focus-group interviews. This study was designed to test 2 hypotheses: (a) that the middle-class group would be the most positively inclined toward English and (b) that the working-class group would display the most positive attitudes toward Putonghua due to closer social distance. Although the results from the questionnaire survey appeared to provide a degree of support for both hypotheses, little evidence was found in the interview data to indicate that the working-class group did, in fact, aspire to Putonghua either as an alternative form of linguistic capital or a symbol of preferred social identity.
[Copyright of International Multilingual Research Journal is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19313150903500945]

This paper reports the findings of a study that investigates the attitudes of 555 boys and 493 girls towards the three official spoken languages used in postcolonial Hong Kong (i.e. Cantonese, English and Putonghua). The respondents started their secondary school education one year after the city was returned to the sovereignty of China from Britain. They were in their fourth year of studies at the time of this research. A questionnaire survey was conducted to find out how differently the two gender groups perceived the three target languages when they were repositioning themselves in the new sociopolitical context of Hong Kong. Informed by the quantitative results, group interviews were conducted to explore the reasons underlying the main attitudinal differences between the two genders. Similar to the research conducted in other parts of the world, female respondents were found to be consistently more positive than their male counterparts in their attitudes towards the non-native languages while male students were more positively inclined to the vernacular. Given the more accommodating attitudes of females to other languages, it is more likely that they will be the group who pushes Hong Kong forward towards a higher degree of multilingualism.
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Both Japan and Hong Kong seek to enhance the English standard of their secondary school students by implementing a native-speaking English teachers scheme, named the JET (Japan Exchange and Teaching) Programme in Japan and the NET (Native-speaking English Teachers) Scheme in Hong Kong. However, the implications of these programmes seem to be sociopolitical more than educational. As for Japan, JET is a consequence of an explicit political strategy to promote international relationships. The Japanese Government is keen to bring up a generation that is able to understand other countries yet retain Japanese national consciousness. On the surface, the Hong Kong NET Scheme seems to be a more straightforward language improvement programme. However, the Japanese experience suggests another level of analysis. The Hong Kong Government is never as explicit as Japan as to what it wants to achieve through the NET Scheme. Though NET is claimed to be a language improvement scheme, there is no evidence to show how effectively this kind of programme can work in local Hong Kong secondary schools. With a special interest in the ideologies behind the two language improvement programmes, this paper attempts to explore their sociopolitical and cultural meanings beyond their educational surface.
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When Hong Kong was returned to the sovereignty of China by the British in July 1997, the new Hong Kong SAR (Special Administrative Region) Government announced the 'Biliterate and Trilingual' policy for all schools. Hong Kong students of this generation are expected to be proficient in both written English and Chinese, and speak fluent English (the international language), Cantonese (the vernacular language) as well as Putonghua (the national language of the PRC). To find out the attitudes of secondary school students towards these three languages, a questionnaire study was conducted with 134 senior secondary students. Given also the important relationship between social class, achievement and language attitudes (Schumann, 1976; Gibbons, 1984; Gardner, 1985; Siu, 1988; Lee, 1998), this paper compares the language attitudes of two main groups of Hong Kong students, namely the middle-class elite and the working-class low-achievers. The findings showed that the former group was more inclined to use English while the latter group the vernacular Cantonese. Despite this difference, both groups of students held generally positive attitudes towards the three languages.
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