Field experience at the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) is viewed as a central aspect to our programmes. The proposed chapter will discuss a project that aimed to enhance student teachers' professional development in FE by adopting mobile technology and cloud services. Also, the use of digital forms of FE documents such as TP supervision forms, FE portfolios, and reflective journals enables student teachers and Institute supervisors to build their own e-portfolio for further sharing of their professional practices within and outside the Institute.
[Copyright © 2016, IGI Global.]

How Chinese language proficiency can be enhanced is a key concern in the Hong Kong community. As the current literature suggests that student teachers' beliefs and past experience show great impact on the effectiveness of their learning to teach, this researcher made an attempt to investigate pre-service teachers' perceptions of teaching and learning Chinese in primary schools - a survey that involved 501 student teachers was conducted. The key findings include, first, over 80% of the respondents rated their own Chinese proficiency average or above average, and over 10% respondents considered themselves poor in the mastery of Chinese. Second, while a total of 86% of the respondents considered themselves average or good at speaking Chinese, they still expressed the need to receive more training in oral presentation and writing. And third, among the 13 prescribed teaching objectives set in the syllabi of Chinese, "fostering students' thinking ability" came first in the survey responents' ranking of the importance of teaching objectives, reflecting they needed training in both the subject knowledge of Chinese and pedagogical content knowledge.
[Copyright © 2002 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

How Chinese language proficiency can be enhanced is a key concern in the Hong Kong community. Education Commission Report No. 6 (1995) suggests that teacher education institutions should give more attention to language awareness and language skills in initial training programs. Before teacher educators work out an ideal program for initial training of Chinese language teachers, research findings in TESOL might have shed light on the direction of developing such a program. Freeman (1989) sees language teaching as 'a decision-making process based on four constituents: knowledge, skills, attitude, and awareness'. Almarza (1996), Bailey & Nunan (1996), Richardson (1996), Grossman (1990, 1991a), Barnes (1989) and Claxton (1985) etc. all observe that student teachers' beliefs and past experience show great impact on the effectiveness of their learning to teach. In the light of these past studies, this paper intends to investigate first year pre-service teachers' perceptions of teaching and learning Chinese in primary schooling. It is hoped that findings in this survey can serve as a reference for the development of Chinese language teacher education especially in the Hong Kong context.

Despite the fact that PMI is not the government policy, an increasing number of schools in Hong Kong have adopted different modes of using PMI in teaching Chinese Language since 1997. Such a trend has caused general concern because Putonghua (the standardized spoken form of Modern Chinese) is not the mother tongue of most teachers or students in the local community. The switch of medium in teaching the language subject may have profound impact on the cognitive development of students because most teachers and students will need to acquire another system of speech sounds and lexicon in handling the subject matter. Nevertheless, as the PMI trend prevails, language teachers are under "pressure" to adjust their teaching medium so as to meet the changing social expectation of equipping students with the standardized form of a world language. This paper reports the findings of a recent study of teachers' views of teaching Chinese through PMI in Hong Kong. Among the group of 20 serving teachers in a postgraduate course, some are proficient in Putonghua and some are not. Through a series of seminar presentation and discussion, these front line teachers revealed the current practices in different school contexts. Insights of these participants represent an "insider's" view of the issue and should inform the development of effective ways of reforming the teaching medium of Chinese in a complex social context.

This paper reports a lesson learned from an initial attempt of incorporating ICT into ordinary module teaching of Chinese linguistics in a teacher education programme. In the teaching and learning process, student teachers were found strongly motivated by online exercises but were not interested in using other online facilities. Feedback from the module participants on the reasons underlying the behaviour patterns identified were collected through focus group interviews at different stages of the module. Findings indicate that poor computer literacy in Chinese, frequent contact with other participants and the lecturer and learning styles all hindered the participants from responding to online discussion and sharing. To optimize the use of e-learning facilities in supporting the study of the same module, the participants suggested that more sensible and authentic online activities are needed. Educators interested in adopting e-learning need to plan and structure more tactically in establishing a context for deep online learning.
[Copyright © 2004 The Association for Advancement of Computing in Education.]