This paper provides a case study of the use of language objectives within a newly developed English language teacher education programme in Hong Kong. The programme development team decided to adopt a content-based language teaching approach to support students' second language development through content learning. The teacher education programme (the content) prepares Chinese-speaking students to become secondary level English teachers. Because of students' level of English language proficiency upon entry, the programme must provide substantial support for students' English language development in addition to their learning of subject content knowledge and ELT pedagogy. There is also a government-stipulated proficiency level for all qualified English language teachers, which essentially becomes the language syllabus for the programme. The language objectives serve as a medium for mapping the language syllabus on the content curriculum. There are reasons to believe that the approach adopted has been successful in supporting students' language and content learning. This paper describes the programme development and implementation process and the problems and constraints met. The paper also shares the lessons learnt from the curriculum development and implementation process.
[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/le771.0]

Viewing education as a complex site for endorsing and contesting knowledges and practices we explore its critical roles in feminist language planning. Many types of language planning have relied heavily on education for the implementation and spread of the particular reform agenda largely reliant on discourses of compulsory obligation (e.g. spelling reforms). The scenario of feminist language planning reveals that education is not a mere external agent of implementation but central to the raising of awareness or provoking an 'Initiating Trajectory' (Winter & Pauwels, 2003). However, the implementation of gender-inclusive practices ('Trajectories of Practices') in education highlights contexts of conflict (and confusion) about grammatical prescriptions and social reform (Pauwels & Winter, 2006). In this paper we probe the adoption, problematisation and invigoration of 'Agency Trajectories' in (language) educators' narratives and classroom practices. Our investigation includes educators operating in diverse English-language communities (e.g. Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong).
[Copyright of Current Issues in Language Planning is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/cilp093.0 ]

This article examines colonial language policies and practices at the government Central School, Hong Kong - the so-called Eton of the East - in the second half of the nineteenth century. The article, which draws on a range of unpublished primary sources, seeks to enhance our knowledge of an important episode in Hong Kong's educational history and, in so doing, illuminate our understanding of British attitudes towards the learning and use of English in the empire. The article is divided into three main sections. The first section analyses the nature and purposes of the scheme to 'centralise' government-sponsored English teaching in a flagship school in the early 1860s. The second section investigates the roles of the English and Chinese languages in the colonial curriculum and the approaches to the teaching of English adopted by the school's founding Headmaster, Frederick Stewart. The final section examines the reform of the Central School in the late nineteenth century.
[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/le744.0]

This article examines the attitudes of the colonial and metropolitan governments towards the promotion of English-language education on Hong Kong Island between 1842 and 1860. The study, which draws on a range of unpublished primary sources, was conducted in response to Whitehead's recent call for detailed case studies of colonial education policies. This article explores, within the context of Hong Kong, a centrally important aspect of education in the Empire, and one that has been the subject of surprisingly little archival research: British policies towards the teaching and learning of English as a second language. The article begins by analysing the political, economic and demographic forces that influenced the study and use of English in Hong Kong during the 1840s and 1850s, and then moves on to examine language policies and practices in the colony's mission schools, with a particular focus on the Morrison Education Society School, the first Western school to be established on the Island after the British occupation. The final section analyses the introduction of English teaching in the government vernacular schools in the early 1850s.
[Copyright of History of Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00467600600745395]

This article first reviews important issues of language, power, and testing. It then examines in critical fashion a particular instance of the use of language testing by the Hong Kong government, namely, the Language Proficiency Assessment for Teachers (LPAT). Treating the LPAT developments as a form of narrative rather than debate, it presents analysis through a context-events-problem-solution-evaluation discourse sequence that perpetuates nonresolution. This procedure permits ongoing reference to and evaluation of the political, educational, and language setting, the schizophrenic position of English, government language policy documentation, the test itself, and media coverage of the results. It indicates the detrimental effects of the LPAT for test-takers, for learning, and for the community at large, advancing and justifying some alternatives and explaining why such lines of resistance lie beyond the purview of most teacher victims. It concludes that the LPAT examination should be heeded both as an early sign of increasingly illiberal political tendencies and as a warning example of bad educational practice.
[Copyright of Journal of Language Identity and Education is the property of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15327701jlie0403_2]