The fact that the number of sojourn programs organised to overseas and mainland China has grown rapidly in recent years in secondary schools in Hong Kong underlines the interest of schools in embracing the ideal of providing more learning opportunities for students under the growing impact of globalization. In this study, with its definition referring to short-term programs organised by Hong Kong secondary schools for students to reside temporarily in a foreign land for the purpose of learning, these popular programs have been playing a significant role in internationalisation of Hong Kong education through varied student interactions with peoples and cultures. This study particularly attempts to explore the nature of sojourn programs, how different stakeholders think about the importance and their impact on the process of internationalisation of Hong Kong secondary education. The study also explores how secondary schools in Hong Kong maintain a balance between destinations in China and overseas (such as Australia, UK and Canada) in an era of educational reforms.
This is a doctoral work in progress, a primitive research and data collected will be presented to reveal the significance of the study.
[Copyright of Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) at http://www.aare.edu.au]

The internationalisation of higher education in countries such as Australia and the UK has resulted in increased numbers of South-East Asia students in higher education classrooms. While considerable attention has been given to exploring the implications of internationalisation on students in 'Western' university contexts, there is a paucity of research concerning the effect on teachers of higher education and, in particular, those employed in to teach in countries culturally foreign to their own. This paper aims to initiate such discussion through an exploration of the experiences of two teaching academics working in Hong Kong. Discussion will focus on issues of language and communication, and social and cultural distance, and the effect of hierarchy and related teaching strategies developed to meet the inter-cultural learning needs of themselves and their students. It is argued that, the development of inter-cultural understandings must permeate the curricula, and be a shared goal and responsibility of both teachers and students.
[Copyright of Teaching in Higher Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/135625100114975]

Short-term international experiences (STIE) are becoming a regular, sometimes required, feature of pre-service language teacher education programmes. Often inappropriately termed 'immersion programmes', they aim to give teachers the opportunity to improve their language proficiency in the language they will teach, to develop their pedagogical knowledge and to engage with an international sociocultural environment with which they are not familiar. In this article we report on a study which investigated pre-service English second language teachers' perceptions of a six-week international experience in Auckland, New Zealand. The student teachers, who were enrolled in a postgraduate diploma in teaching at a Hong Kong university, participated in an academic programme as well as a series of social events and school visits. They were encouraged to reflect on their expectations and experiences and to write about these in a pre-programme questionnaire, reflective journals and a summative programme evaluation. The teachers' articulations reveal that their expectations and experiences interrelate in complex, sometimes unexpected, ways. The findings have important implications for the coordinators of the programme at the host institution and also for those further afield who are involved in planning and managing similar STIE programmes.
[Copyright of Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13598660500479904]