Gender stereotyping has long been an issue for gender and language research from as early as the 1970s, and analyses on gender representation in English language textbooks have been frequently conducted. However, gender representation in assessment papers, another commonly occurring genre in education, remains unexplored in Hong Kong research. Therefore, this paper was aimed to explore how males and females are represented in Territory-wide System Assessment (TSA), a territory-level assessment administered in Hong Kong, to find out if gender stereotyping is still an issue. The data of the current study include the recent 10 years of TSA Primary 3 English Language Reading & Writing papers. A total of 33 sets of TSA Primary 3 English Language Reading & Writing papers was analysed by using content and linguistic analyses for their written texts and visual analysis for visual elements. The key findings include: males and females are represented similarly in the written texts and in the visuals, and females are portrayed as involving in occupational roles more frequently than males in both the written texts and visuals. However, it is always females who were drawn to be focused on family matters, and the marital status of a female is still distinguished by the use of either Miss or Mrs. Suggestions for test paper designers and examination authorities are given and implications for future research studies are drawn at the end of this paper. Copyright ©Springer New York LLC.

This study was conducted to investigate learners’ perceptions and the impacts of a theme-based teaching approach on children’s levels of interests in an English course for primary ESL students in Hong Kong in a non-school setting. A total number of 88 participants (including 76 grade 4 and 5 children and 12 course tutors) were involved. To discover if the children became more interested in learning English after the course, their perceptions of theme-based teaching, and their opinions of the themes chosen for the English course, data were collected from both the children (through the pre- and post-course questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews) and the course tutors (through the tutors’ questionnaires). The major finding is that theme-based teaching in this study could not make learners become more interested in learning English unless teachers were able to use interesting activities and suitable materials in their lessons. The themes of the course should suit the proficiency level, wants and needs of the learners and be relevant to their daily lives. Before the course begins, a placement test should be administered to ascertain the current language level of the learners. At the end of the course, evaluation should be made to assess the effectiveness of the course.
[Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching Copyright © Centre for Language Studies of the National University of Singapore. The journal web site is located at http://e-flt.nus.edu.sg]

This paper aims to find out the views of 26 pre-service and 8 in-service English teachers in Hong Kong about the information technology courses in their teacher education programmes. The findings of the study show that while both software applications and technology integration in teaching are highlighted in the course outline, the instructor focused more on the application aspect, with the technology integration being less emphasised. Another important finding is that PowerPoint was still the most commonly used application in teaching and the involved pre-service and in-service teachers usually just simply used different computer applications as alternatives to traditional teaching resources. This may reflect the fact that the Information technology courses are not adequate to prepare teachers to teach with it.
[Copyright © 2011 Universidad Nacional de Colombia. The journal web site is located at http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_serial&pid=1657-0790&lng=en&nrm=iso]

The present study examines how gender is represented in the visuals (or illustrations) of two English Language textbook series used in most primary schools in Hong Kong. Instead of conducting frequency counts of the occurrence of male and female characters in illustrations or the spheres of activities they engaged in as in previous textbook studies, this study involves qualitative analyses of how visualised male and female characters are represented in the selected illustrations of the analysed textbook series in terms of their hair length and clothing. The results show that human females were more often portrayed having long hair than short hair and wearing dresses than trousers in both line drawings and photographs. For the colour of clothing, although blue and pink are generally considered ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ colours respectively, less than half and only a small percentage of the human males and females were portrayed wearing blue and pink respectively. For non-human characters, again, colour is not always a reliable cue to their sex. Yet, they can be recognised as males and females by the generally accepted ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ colour and clothing items.

A much under-researched issue in higher education is the extent to which English-medium university courses help students improve their English proficiency in an ESL context. Adopting a longitudinal, mixed methods design in which quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed, the current study tracked English language improvement, or lack thereof, among 33 students over a 12-month segment of a Bachelor of Education degree (B.Ed.) program. The results revealed that on average, student scores showed very slight improvement both overall and across each of the four skill areas, although there was considerable variation among the students in the amount of improvement or lack of improvement made. Analysis of the interview data identified a combination of factors that might influence students’ English language development in the B.Ed. program. Important implications of the results for pedagogical practices that facilitate ESL teacher trainees’ English language proficiency development are discussed. Although this study took place in Hong Kong, it has value in other contexts where second or foreign language learners study disciplinary content through the target language.
[Copyright © 2015 the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center and Presidio of Monterey.]

Gender equality has long been an issue for gender and language research from as early as the 1970s to the contemporary era in the 2010s, and gender stereotyping in textbooks is an issue in many different countries (Davis, 1995; see also Blumberg, 2007, 2008). While secondary English Language textbooks published in Hong Kong have already been investigated by Lee and Collins (2008), primary English Language textbooks have rarely been investigated (but see Au, 1992; Au, 2004). Therefore, the present study investigates gender representation in two widely-used primary English Language textbook series, Step Up and Primary Longman Express, by examining two subgenres that can be widely found in all language textbooks: reading passages and dialogues, and visuals. In other words, textual (lexis and grammar), discourse and visual representations of gender are analysed. A combination of different methods is used in this study. First, to answer the research question of how gender is represented in the reading passages in the Step Up and Primary Longman Express series in terms of lexis and grammar (Research Question A), content, linguistic and discourse analyses are conducted. Then, pragmatics and conversation analysis are used to analyse how the discourse of males and female speakers is represented in the dialogues in the two textbook series (Research Question B). Finally, to analyse the representation of gender in the visuals in the two textbook series (Research Question C), the method of visual analysis is used. To make sure that the quantitative results obtained are significant, the chi-square test is also used and log-likelihood values are calculated. The results of this study are encouraging in that males and females are represented similarly and fairly, and show in improvement over previous textbook studies in gender representation. In textual representation of gender, at the lexical level, though males were represented more often than females in terms of having a higher frequency