The linguistic backgrounds of English learners in Hong Kong are highly complex and diverse. There are local Hong Kong learners who speak Cantonese as their native language, new immigrants and students from different dialectal regions in mainland China and non-Chinese learners from the Philippines and Pakistan, among others. To optimise the effectiveness of English pronunciation teaching with such a diverse student body, it is of paramount importance to provide Hong Kong teachers with a spoken learner corpus. This paper introduces a self-developed spoken learner corpus and shows how it can be used in the design of pedagogic applications. The establishment of a learner corpus can help teachers understand the recurrent pronunciation difficulties encountered by learners of particular language backgrounds so that they can customise their teaching materials. To promote pronunciation teaching using this corpus, a teacher training programme was designed and conducted. Pre-service and in-service teachers participated in three face-to-face and real-time streaming workshop sessions, two online sessions, and a lesson plan design competition. Most of the participants appreciated the authenticity of the learner speech data, the diversity of speaker language backgrounds and the effectiveness of using the corpus as a teaching tool. Nonetheless, some suggested that the diversity of reading materials for eliciting speech data could be improved and that more dialect subgroups could be included in the corpus. Copyright © 2023 UKM Press, National University of Malaysia (UKM).

Purpose:This study explores the contributions and effectiveness of the Jockey Club "Giftedness into Flourishing Talents" Project (Project GIFT) in supporting learner diversity in gifted education, including meeting the educational and psychological needs of highly capable and gifted students in Hong Kong.Design/Approach/Methods:This study investigates the effectiveness of Project GIFT in supporting the development of diversity in learning in 20 project schools. Through close cooperation with project schools, Project GIFT comprised six developmental areas: school development, curriculum development, teachers' professional development, parent empowerment, student development, and financial support. To further assess the usefulness of the school-based support provided by Project GIFT, this study examines the implementation of school-based gifted education in two project schools based on the aforementioned components.Findings:This study reveals Project GIFT's significant role in promoting school-based gifted education in Hong Kong schools. Indeed, it was the first cross-institutional and research-based educational program in gifted education that intervened at both Level 1 (whole class) and Level 2 (pullout) of the three-tiered policy stipulated by the Hong Kong Education Bureau. One of the few gifted education programs implemented in Asia, Project GIFT focused on six key components to specifically support high-ability and gifted students with diverse educational and affective needs. This study shows that Project GIFT significantly enhanced diversity in learning, its collaboration with two key schools resulting in the successful enhancement of school development, professional development, curriculum development, student development, parent empowerment, and financial support.Originality/Value:The article fills the research gap by examining the effectiveness of a school-based gifted education program focused on enriching and differentiating curricula for different regular

Purpose: Catering for learner diversity is a key issue in the recent educational reforms in Hong Kong. The present study addresses this issue through an investigation of the relationships between students' learning styles and approaches to learning in Hong Kong secondary schools.Design/Approach/Methods: A total of 6,054 junior secondary students in Hong Kong responded to a questionnaire consisting of two instruments. A series of confirmatory factor analysis, two-way analysis of variance, and structural equation modeling analysis were conducted.Findings: The results identified three types of learning style among the students which are characterized by a cognitive orientation, a social orientation, and a methodological orientation. Some significant gender- and achievement-level differences were revealed. Compared with the socially oriented learning style, the cognitively and methodologically oriented learning styles were more extensively and strongly related to students' approaches to learning, even though these students showed a greater preference for the socially oriented learning style.Originality/Value: It is unwise to blindly cater for students' learning styles in classroom teaching and curriculum design. Teachers should adopt a comprehensive and balanced approach toward the design of curriculum and teaching which not only highlights the congruence between students' learning styles and teacher's pedagogy but also integrates the constructive frictions between them into classroom teaching. Copyright © 2020 The Author(s).

Differentiated instruction (DI) is nothing new and is believed to be an effective research-based strategy to cater for learner diversity. Differentiation involves finding multiple ways to structure a lesson so that each student is provided with an opportunity to work at a moderately challenging level. Previous studies, however, found that teachers were not well prepared and insufficiently equipped with skills and knowledge about DI. In the recent Hong Kong curriculum reform, DI has been highlighted as one of the ways to catering to learner diversity. The purpose of the study is to examine in-service teachers' readiness for using DI strategies and perceived challenges in its implementation. Using a mixed-methods design, a questionnaire was used to investigate teachers' perceived readiness for and obstacles toward using DI strategies, as followed by semi-structured focus group interviews that were done to in-service teachers of two schools. Qualitative data as obtained from the interviews was used to explain the quantitative data. With the use of factor analysis, two factors were identified in the survey, including Factor 1 Teacher-centred approach and Factor 2 Student-centred approach. Findings indicated that teachers generally tended to be ready for using DI strategies; however, they were more ready for using teacher-centred approach. Three perceived obstacles toward DI were identified: class size and diversity, time, and understanding of teaching strategies. Implications for curriculum development, professional development and research directions will be discussed at the end of the paper.

The session is a description of making changes of the learning environment of a kindergarten in Hong Kong.