This paper focuses on collaboration between native-speaking English teachers (NETs) and local English teachers (LETs) in Hong Kong secondary schools. It examines some of the strengths and weaknesses of NETs and LETs documented in the international literature. It reviews, in various contexts, schemes where team teaching has been carried out. Using case studies of selected effective practitioners augmented by recent published research, we discuss how native and non-native teachers worked together and how their collaboration impacted on themselves and their students. Our analysis elaborates on some inter- and intra-personal factors facilitating the team teaching, balanced by some of the dilemmas particularly with respect to educational philosophies. The paper concludes by arguing for relationships between particular features of the collaborations and theorised conditions for second language acquisition.
[Copyright of Language and Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/le627.0 ]

This paper discusses the concept of 'cultural cross‐currents,' their implicit nature and the potential they have to effect second language literacy learning, teaching and curriculum reform in Hong Kong primary classrooms. Despite the substantive implications for learning, the exploration of cultural influences upon teacher and student thinking and the resultant educational consequences, remains a largely unrecognized area. The central argument in the paper is that cultural differences in attitudes, beliefs and values of cultural groups toward the way first and second languages are acquired needs to be made explicit in order to facilitate second language literacy teaching and learning.
[Copyright of Intercultural Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14675980600693947]

This paper describes the use of coaching as a means to enhance professional development of English-language teachers in a school involved in a partnership project in Hong Kong, which is characterised in terms of three phases. While the rationale for bringing in coaches into the school is on creating effective professional development environments for teachers--that is, providing ongoing supports and forming a community of practice focused on instructional methods, curriculum innovation, and new formats for instructional delivery--after 18 months of the partnership project it was found that the teacher/coach relationship is more complicated than expected. The paper will end with suggestions on how the three key stakeholders, namely the teachers, principal and teacher educators, can co-construct effective professional development environments.
[Copyright of Journal of In-Service Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13674580701486952]

This paper presents how the content and language that are cross-curricular and subject-specific in Targets and Target-Related Assessment are interrelated. It offers the way of how learning through inquiring, thinking, problem-solving, communicating, and valuing can be worked within the related framework of language.

Two interactional strategies explicitly taught to learners of English in Hong Kong are how to check that the hearer understands what you are saying as you communicate and, conversely, how to check that you have understood another speaker's message. The forms of these strategies that are taught in Hong Kong schools are fairly limited. This study seeks, through examining authentic spoken discourse in the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE), to determine the ways in which these strategies are linguistically realised in real life communication, compared to the intuitions of materials writers that find their way into school textbooks. The findings suggest that more awareness of the realities of language use would be of benefit to textbook writers and teachers, enabling them to incorporate a wider and more accurate range of forms into their teaching materials, in order, in turn, to foster a more accurate awareness of language and language use in their learners. The approaches of corpus-driven research and data-driven learning are useful; through these, language learners can also become language researchers themselves, engaging themselves in the examination and analysis of corpus data.
[Copyright of Language Awareness is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/la455.0]