As in most countries, human rights education (HRE) in Hong Kong has never been high on the educational agenda. In 2009, a compulsory subject, Liberal Studies (LS), which could be used as a platform for HRE, was introduced. The Hong Kong Institute of Education launched a research and development project which, as one of its objectives, studied LS teachers' attitudes towards human rights and Rule of Law. This article first provides a brief overview of HRE. Then, the potential of HRE in LS will be discussed, followed by an introduction of the research project. Subsequently, the research design and findings will be presented. The findings reveal that there is a large gap between teachers' understandings of human rights and international human rights standards. Since LS teachers' attitudes are crucial for effective HRE, the findings are quite striking. The paper ends with recommendations for further research, policy formulations, and teacher preparation.
[Copyright of Intercultural Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14675986.2012.716725]

Liberal studies is a new subject in the new senior secondary curriculum in Hong Kong. This study attempted to identify factors that shape liberal studies student teachers' decisions in lesson planning. Based on interview data and lesson plans developed by the student teachers, this article maintains that four factors interacted with the subject features of liberal studies to shape the student teachers' planning decisions, namely, teacher knowledge, curriculum requirements, materials and resources, and interaction with equal and more capable partners. This paper further looks into how teacher knowledge expresses itself at different stages of lesson planning. The findings suggest that to facilitate enquiry learning in students, liberal studies teachers need to adopt an enquiry stance in lesson planning. This paper argues that the limitations of liberal studies student teachers' content knowledge need to be addressed in teacher preparation programmes and suggests teacher networking as one way to strengthen novice liberal studies teachers' content preparation. The implications for teacher education are discussed.
[Copyright of Journal of Education for Teaching is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02607476.2011.558287]

This paper considers issues in customising descriptions of English grammar in the context of creating an electronic database for secondary school teachers in Hong Kong. In developing the database, we have aimed to incorporate insights from functional grammar and corpus linguistics while keeping the information accessible and relevant to teachers familiar only with traditional approaches to grammar. This has involved exploiting the advantages of hypertext, explicitly foregrounding pedagogical concerns and developing a metalanguage that will allow discussion of areas such as transitivity and theme without alienating the teacher-users. We illustrate the kinds of compromises that are necessary in order to match the linguistic information to the needs and existing knowledge of the teacher-users.
[Copyright of Language Awareness is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658410008667134]

An in-depth investigation is currently being conducted into the metalinguistic awareness of a group of practising L2 teachers, all non-native speakers teaching English in Hong Kong secondary schools. The investigation focuses on teacher metalinguistic awareness (TMA) as it relates to grammar. As part of this in-depth study, a test was administered in order to explore the declarative dimension of TMA: the teacher's explicit knowledge of grammar and grammatical terminology. The test was based largely on Alderson et al. (1996), which in turn draws upon Bloor (1986). The present paper reports on the test performance of these serving teachers as an indication of the level and nature of their explicit knowledge of grammar and grammatical terminology. It also compares their performance with that of two groups of prospective teachers of EFL/ESL: one group of native-speakers and the other of non-native speakers. Comparison with the former helps to shed light on the native/non-native issue (see, for example, Medgyes, 1994) as it relates to explicit knowledge of grammar, while comparison with the latter offers some indication of the effects of post-secondary education and teaching experience upon such knowledge.
[Copyright of Language Awareness is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658419908667125]

The current global movement in the reform of education seems to focus on a number of issues that include standards, quality and teacher preparation. With regard to the latter, while teacher education curricula in most parts of the world attempt to strike a balance between content and professional training, the emerging scenario is that of training expert teachers. Three types of knowledge identified as necessary for expert teaching are content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. For Hong Kong to embark on a satisfactory and effective public education reform, it is essential that its most valuable human resource (i.e. teachers) must be comprehensively and adequately developed. Attention must be paid to both pre-service and in-service to raise an excellent quality-oriented teaching force. Teacher educators and researchers make important and well-informed decisions about what should be included in pre-service and in-service teacher development programmes. However, it is also important to take into account the teachers' own perceptions about the areas in which they feel confident and knowledgeable and those inwhich they do not. One practical avenue of sourcing such information is the teacher in training who is learning to acquire and display expertise. This paper reports on an investigation using a sample of 183 science and mathematics trainee teachers. A 60-item instrument, the Science and Mathematics Expert Teacher Preparation Survey (SMETPS),was developed to gather data on trainee teachers' perceptions of their current knowledge and what they think they need to know to become expert teachers. The data, analysed using both descriptive and inferential statistics, indicated some of the areas in which trainee teachers identified the need for future professional development that would contribute towards expert training. Several issues which emerged from the results are discussed, with reference to implications for current efforts in expert teacher