In this paper, I analyse pupil-teacher dialogue, in a mixture of English and Cantonese, from a segment of a Form 2(Grade 8, 13-14yrs) English reading lesson. The lesson was video taped in a working-class school in Hong Kong, and the excerpt is taken from a larger corpus of similar lesson data videotaped in the class over three consecutive weeks. The analysis shows how these Cantonese children, with limited English, succeeded in subverting the reading lesson, which was based entirely on information extraction tasks.Instead, they negotiated their own preferred comic-style narratives by cleverly making use of the response slots of the IRF (Initiation-Response-Feedback) discourse format used in the lesson. Thus they achieved genuinely creative responses, in spite of the curriculum. The implications for teaching are discussed.
[Copyright of Language, Culture and Curriculum is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07908319908666585]

Reading comprehension can be seen as a process dependent on the interaction of 'topdown' and 'bottom-up' processes. An important, but neglected, feature of this process concerns the effects of rhetorical organization. This article describes an experiment in which four rhetorically different texts, with identical subject matter, were read by 490 Hong Kong Chinese school children (mean age 14.1), studying in English (their L2). Comprehension was measured by a cloze procedure and by recall protocols. One way ANOVA was used to investigate the effects of different texts on the test scores. The results showed a clear difference in comprehension between the text types and suggest that pedagogical support to increase awareness of rhetorical patterns would be beneficial.
[Copyright of Reading in a Foreign Language is the property of Meena Singhal & John I. Liontas.
Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/]

This paper describes the development and initial validation of a Chinese reading motivation questionnaire (CRMQ) which was designed to assess Chinese students' reading motivation in Hong Kong. The development of the CRMQ consisted of two steps. In the first study, groups of items were constructed based on achievement motivation theories and existing instruments. The initial version of the CRMQ was administered to a small group of Grade 7 students in Hong Kong and exploratory factor analysis, item-total correlation, and reliability analyses were carried out to assess its psychometric quality. The CRMQ was then revised and administered to a larger sample of Grade 7 students in the second study. Findings of confirmatory factor analysis provided further validation for the proposed factor structure of the revised questionnaire. In addition, findings indicated that students' reading motivation was positively related to their strategy use, reading comprehension, and academic achievement. The findings of this study could enrich our understanding of Chinese reading motivation among Hong Kong students. Implications of these findings for implementing effective reading instruction in Chinese language teaching are also discussed.
[Copyright of Educational Psychology is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144341042000271773]

Eighty-six Hong Kong Chinese kindergarten children were pretested on the Preschool and Primary Chinese Literacy Scale (PPCLS) and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test - Third Edition (PPVT-III), and assigned randomly within schools to 1 of 3 conditions, dialogic reading, typical reading and control. After an 8-week intervention, the children were posttested. Results indicated a significant main group effect for performance on both the PPCLS and the PPVT-III, with children in the dialogic reading group benefiting significantly from the intervention. These results indicate that early literacy-related activities in the home have strong and direct effects on both children's literacy growth and language development in Chinese. The success of the dialogic reading technique in this study contributes to the goal of raising global literacy standards and educational achievement.
[Copyright of Early Education & Development is the property of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15566935eed1402_6 ]

Background This was a small-scale study conducted in Hong Kong Chinese language classes, based on the research in cognitive strategy instruction.
Purpose This study aimed to explore whether Chinese language teachers were able to develop their own school-based strategy instruction programme through collaborating with the researcher.
Programme description The school-based programme was mainly adapted from a Chinese reading strategy instruction programme that was developed by the researcher. It aimed to enhance students' reading comprehension through direct teaching on different reading strategies.
Sample A total of 205 grade 7 students and six teachers from one secondary school in Hong Kong participated in the study. One of the teachers and six students from his class were specially invited to participate as target subjects in an in-depth investigation.
Design and methods This study adopted quantitative methods, including a reading comprehension test and questionnaire, and qualitative methods, including think-aloud measures, interview and observation in programme evaluation.
Results Findings of the study generally suggested that the school-based programme was implemented quite smoothly in the regular Chinese language lessons, and most of the students had better performance on their strategy use and reading comprehension after receiving the programme. While the findings provided preliminary support for developing a school-based strategy instruction programme in Hong Kong Chinese language classes, some problems in changing Chinese language teachers' instructional approach are also discussed.
Conclusions This study explored the possibility of developing a school-based strategy instruction programme in Chinese language classes. Due to the small scale and exploratory nature of the study, however, certain limitations of the research design of this study should be noted.
[Copyright of Educational Research is the property of

Two studies were conducted to investigate the effects of cooperative learning on second-graders' motivation and learning from text. In Study 1, students (n = 160) in cooperative learning groups were compared with their counterparts (n = 107) in traditional instruction groups. The results revealed a statistically significant difference between the two groups, with more favourable perceptions of teachers' instructional practices and better reading comprehension in the instructional intervention groups than in the traditional instruction groups. In Study 2, 51 second-graders participated in the instructional intervention programme. The results showed that students' positive cooperative behaviour and attitudes were related to their motivation and reading comprehension. When students perceived that their peers were willing to help each other and were committed to the group, they tended to be more motivated and performed better in reading comprehension.
[Copyright of Educational Psychology is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01443410701880159]