The integration of popular culture into English language learning has recently been formalised in the Hong Kong New Senior Secondary curriculum, with the development of critical reading indicated as one of the key objectives. Whether and how students respond to popular culture texts is, however, under-researched. The present paper reports findings from a study that investigated how a group of 33 senior secondary (Grade 11) students from three schools representing different levels of academic performance in Hong Kong conducted reading of an authentic print English advertisement. In small groups, the students articulated in Cantonese, their first language, an analysis of the text including its purpose, target audience, and intended impacts. Insights from Stuart Hall's three major decoder positions (dominant reading, oppositional reading, and negotiated reading) were drawn on to conduct a qualitative content analysis of the students' reading. The findings showed that three-quarters of the students irrespective of their English proficiency levels displayed evidence of critical consumption of the text, but many seemed to have constructed oppositional or negotiated reading positions due to their failure to appreciate linguistic creativity, and spontaneous evaluation of the visual images. The authors argue that language curricula in schools should strengthen students' critical multimodal literacies.
[© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group]

Come August 2009, schools in Hong Kong will be rolling out a new Language Arts Elective called "Learning English Through Popular Culture" to be offered to the Senior Form. This new Popular Culture elective in the New Senior Curriculum is of analytic interest as Hong Kong is the first schooling system, at least in Asia, to take Popular Culture seriously and translate it as "curriculum-as-knowledge" in the national curriculum. While the relationship between Popular Culture and its relevance for schooling and classroom pedagogies has been explored in educational research, in the last decade or so, research conducted in this field has yielded a somewhat tentative and predictable finding often expressed as "pedagogical implications for literacy education and curriculum development" and, as isolated case studies. Yet the Hong Kong education system has taken up what appears to be a bold move to re-design its English Language Curriculum to include Popular Culture - a new curriculum that ostensibly takes into consideration students' interests in popular cultural texts to promote the learning of English. Promising as this new curriculum might be, there are however inherent pedagogical trouble spots in the spelled out curriculum. This paper critically examines and unpacks the articulation of the pedagogical knowledge of the new elective. Although the "curriculum-in-use" remains to be seen, I argue in this paper that the pedagogical investments of this new elective as defined in the curriculum, is reduced to "reading" and "writing" text types, where students are likely to be locked into a procedural way of "thinking" and "doing" popular cultural texts. I suggest how a critical pedagogical practice might be a more productive way of teaching the popular culture curriculum.

In the context of the educational reforms that began at the turn of the century, Hong Kong's New Senior Secondary (NSS) English language curriculum was launched in 2009. An important aim of the curriculum reforms is to make teaching and learning more relevant to students' everyday lives through more studentcentred approaches to pedagogy. In the context of English language teaching and learning, the reforms also involve an emphasis on 'cultural enrichment' and 'personal involvement', in addition to 'language enrichment'. The main feature that supports these aims is an innovative emphasis on language arts and the introduction of four language arts electives, including one entitled Learning English through Popular Culture . Based on analysis of curriculum documents and resources and student surveys conducted before and after the first round of implementation of the 3-year curriculum, this chapter discusses the role that popular culture now plays in senior secondary English language teaching (ELT). While arguing that the inclusion of popular culture in the NSS English curriculum is largely a positive move, it identifies significant unresolved issues in the implementation of the curriculum, which may limit the degree to which it succeeds in achieving its goals of cultural enrichment and making English language teaching more relevant to students' lives.
[Copyright © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore.]

Background: Media education is the study of the media with the aim of cultivating people’s media literacy. In the past four decades, media education has rapidly developed in school systems and communities all over the world. Each country has its own developmental trajectory. With the rise of the interactive new media, media education is going to have a paradigm shift, bringing media education study into a new era.
Goals: This paper discusses the rationales, definitions and approaches of media education. It also provides an overview about the global development of media literacy training.
Results: Although different countries define media education in different ways, they share the common goal of training media literate people to deal with the media in an intelligent and responsible way. Media education has been well developed in the West but in recent years Asia regions such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mainland China and Japan are gaining their momentum. With the emergence of various new media devices, media education is regarded as playing a more important role in cultivating wise prosumers in the 21st century.
背景：傳媒教育以傳媒為研習對象，目的是培養人們的媒介素養。過去四十年，傳媒教育在全球的學校及社區迅速發展，每一個國家都有它獨特的發展軌跡。隨著互動新媒體的興起，傳媒教育也進行範式轉移，將媒介素養的研習帶進新紀元。
目標：這篇文章的目的是介紹傳媒教育的重要性、定義及教學取向，它更為傳媒教育在全球各地的發展提供總覽。
結果：雖然不同國家對傳媒教育有不同的定義，但其實它們都有共同的目標，就是培育具有媒介素養的人，讓他們能精明及負責任地和傳媒打交道。傳媒教育在西方發展得很好，近年它在亞洲地區如香港、台灣、中國大陸及日本都有蓬勃的發展。由於各種新媒體不斷湧現，傳媒教育比以往更有迫切性去培養二十一世紀的「傳媒消費製作人」。
[Copyright of New Horizons: The Journal of Education, Hong Kong Teachers' Associationl is the property of Hong Kong Teachers' Association at http://www.hkta1934.org.hk/]

Nearly every school in Hong Kong claims to provide ethics/religious education as part of the curriculum, but teachers find it difficult to teach values and attitudes without having students find ethics/religious lessons boring. While much has been said about how students learn, it remains that it is the teacher s task to provide the relevant experience and conditions for learning so that learning takes place. Thus such questions arise as, What is relevant experience? and What do students experience? Since most students are exposed to popular culture, the use of it as examples in teaching ethics/religious education may be a solution. This research finds that teachers and students in general enjoy the use of popular culture in the teaching and learning of ethics/religious education. The problems lie with the lack of resources and the already too heavy workload of teachers.
[Copyright of Religious Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00344080308292 ]