To facilitate lifelong learning, recent education reforms have emphasized the development of generic capabilities. However, despite various lists found in previous studies, generic skills and capabilities have neither been well defined nor statistically validated. The present study attempted to (a) conceptualize generic capabilities in terms of 3 dimensions--cognitive, academic, and self, and (b) test the construct validity of generic capabilities using confirmatory factor analysis. Students who attended a continuing education program that was designed to provide an alternative pathway for students who failed in the Hong Kong secondary school system to pursue continuing education (N=2,806) responded to 13 survey items about their generic capabilities before the program (Time 1) and 13 parallel items after it (Time 2). Results supported a multidimensional structure of generic capabilities with the three dimensions at each time point. The conceptualization of a multidimensional structure provides a useful framework for the study of generic capabilities. It also calls for attention to the importance of generic capabilities in curriculum design.
[Copyright of Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) at http://www.aare.edu.au]

Despite the fact that Hong Kong is now a part of China, there are differences between Hong Kong and the main land, especially in terms of the education system, school environment, and learning culture,and learner proficiency level of English. Based on interviews with ten secondary school teachers, the paper discusses the difficulties caused by the recent influx of children from China into Hong Kong. Firstly, there are difficulties for the immigrants themselves. They have to search for a school that will accept the children, and the children are often rejected because their English is not good enough. Secondly, there are difficulties for the classroom teacher. Added to the problems of teaching through English,there are now additional problems with the Chinese children, such as different first languages and no single lingua franca. And there are difficulties for the schools, for example, caused by the lack of systematic admission procedures, and insufficient support for schools and teachers in this respect.The paper makes a number of observations and recommendations that may help to alleviate the situation.
[Copyright of Language, Culture and Curriculum is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07908319908666580]

Some critics have commented that online courses may discourage teacher–student interaction, which is considered by teachers and researchers as an important element in language learning. A total of 60 associate degree students who attended an online English course in Hong Kong responded to a questionnaire asking them about their effort and interest in learning English, their anxiety about computer applications, their self‐monitoring capability, their interactions with the teacher and their peers and their competence in English. Analysis of variance results showed that those students who perceived themselves as more competent had more favourable perceptions of their interaction with the teacher than did those who were less competent, but for all other variables the two groups did not differ. The findings imply that online language learning does not necessarily diminish interaction. Instead, the level of interaction may depend on the learners' sense of competence in the target language.
[Copyright of Educational Media International is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09523980600641429]