The current paper examined the effects of A Balanced Reading Approach for Children Always Designed to Achieve Best Results for All (ABRA), a web-based literacy programme developed by the the Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance (CSLP) at Concordia University, on primary school children in Hong Kong. The participants were 249 Primary 1 students from two low social economic status schools in Hong Kong and the two schools were well-matched on many demographic characteristics. All participating students were pre-tested in the fall and post-tested in the following spring. After adjusting for pretest differences, the treatment school scored significantly higher than the controls on three of the six outcome measures at post-tests: phoneme-grapheme correspondence (ES = +0.22, p < 0.05), phoneme segmentation (ES = +0.46, p < 0.00), and nonsense word fluency (ES = +0.22, p < 0.06). Both treatment and control students scored similarly on word reading, listening comprehension, and initial sound fluency. The outcomes of the study provides some promising evidence of the effects of ABRA on Chinese primary students in Hong Kong, especially on the enhancement of phonological skills, thus leading to early success in the formative years of learning English as a Second Language (ESL). Practical implications are discussed.
[Copyright of Education and Information Technologies is the property of Springer New York LLC.]

How can transnational education (TNE) programs be made more effective? According to the literature, no one is in a better position to comment on this question than the students themselves. At the same time, there is a recognized scarcity in the literature of student input into the issue of transnational program effectiveness. In consideration of this need, a research study was conducted to examine the effectiveness of TNE programs from the student perspective. To this end, transnational students' views on the various dimensions of the TNE context were used as a key indicator of the effectiveness of transnational programs. The evaluated dimensions included student, instructor, curriculum and instruction design, interaction, evaluation and assessment, technology, and program management, and organisational support. Data for the study was collected from approximately five hundred transnational students participating in eight transnational undergraduate computing programs offered by four Australian universities in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam. Overall, students from the eight different programs considered in this study were in agreement as to the factors they perceived as most important to the effectiveness of transnational programs. As anticipated and confirmed by the literature, students were of the view that their own motivation, self-discipline, and the ability to work independently, as well as in a team, was a pre-condition of an effective program. With respect to instructors, students attached the greatest importance to the instructors' ability to understand program requirements and student needs, use communication skills effectively, and be well prepared and organized. They were also in agreement regarding the importance of instructors' experience with technology- based programs and their ability to provide well-designed syllabus and presentation outlines. The relevance of the curriculum to job and career was perceived as the most important aspect of

This study investigates how genre can be used as an organisational principle to interweave teaching and assessment in the L2 school context. Relying on data from interviews and lesson observations gathered from two Secondary 1 (that is, Grade 7) Hong Kong classrooms, the study sought to discover how teachers implemented genre-based teaching and assessment in traditional product- and exam-oriented writing classrooms, students' and teachers' evaluation of the approach, as well as the factors that might facilitate or restrain the genre innovation. The findings show that teachers worked collaboratively and shared a common vision in implementing genre-based teaching and assessment, making sure that they integrated teaching and assessment through a focus on genre. Although the limitations of the genre approach were noted, the innovation was generally well received by students and teachers, who felt that the innovation had enabled students to improve their writing and helped teachers enhance their practice. A few facilitative and inhibitory factors are discussed. The findings suggest that the implementation of genre-based teaching and assessment has to be considered within the ecology of teachers' work.
[Copyright of English Teaching: Practice & Critique is the property of Universidad del Zulia.
Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://edlinked.soe.waikato.ac.nz/research/journal/index.php?id=1]

This study examines the effect of a reading intervention aimed at improving the comprehension performance of three students with hyperactive behaviours in Hong Kong. Comprehension tasks, adopted from local exercise books based on Hong Kong Certificate Education Examination Paper I, were used to appraise three participants' reading performance, and their corresponding in-class behaviours were observed and recorded as a point of reference. A five-week reading intervention, introducing four major adjustments to the conventional drilling task, including pre-teaching vocabulary, providing visual clues, offering instructions on a separate piece of paper and encouraging productive physical movements, resulted in an improved reading outcome. Following the treatment stage, a two-week conventional comprehension approach was re-employed and results compared with those at the pre-intervention stage. A very slight improvement was shown, suggesting the effectiveness of the intervention. A similar pattern of improvement in students' behaviour was shown during the intervention. The results indicated that students made improvements in terms of both comprehension results and behavioural status. Implications for teachers facilitating students with hyperactive behaviours are discussed.
[Copyright of Emotional & Behavioural Difficulties is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13632752.2011.545644]

Many children around the globe are learning English as a foreign language, especially in Asia. Numbers of participants and development of programs are increasing rapidly, as is a commercial testing movement targeted toward assessing this group of young learners. For example, the popular Cambridge Young Learners English test series has had more than 360,000 young testers globally (Cambridge ESOL Examinations, 2004, 2007). Published research on assessment for young learners has focused on developing reliable and appropriate assessment instruments at school or national levels, but little work has focused on the private uses of commercial international language tests for children. Reporting on a 3-year project investigating Hong Kong young learners' participation in commercial international language test taking and preparation, this article explores stakeholders' perceptions on the practice in order to examine the social consequences. The project adopted a multimethod qualitative approach with data including interviews with stakeholders from the education and commercial sectors, classroom observations, participant observation in online parenting forums, and documentary research on media coverage and advertisements. Our findings suggested that in lieu of clear and perceived fairness in their own education system, stakeholders were using language tests as a grassroots movement to gain access to material educational resources.
[Copyright of Language Assessment Quarterly is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15434303.2010.537417]

The evaluation of government-financed research has become increasingly important in the last few decades in terms of increasing the quality of, and payoff from, the research that is done, reducing the cost of doing it, and lending public credibility to the manner in which research is funded. But there are very large differences throughout the world in the extent to which systems used promote these results. This paper briefly presents the dimensional results of a study designed to comparatively evaluate the national-level research evaluation models in sixteen countries on five merit-defining dimensions.
[Copyright of Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation is the property of Dove Medical Press Ltd .
Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://survey.ate.wmich.edu/jmde/index.php/jmde_1]