Teaching is a female-dominated career in both Western and Eastern societies. While low salary and social status have been suggested by previous research as the main reasons, these cannot explain the phenomenon in Hong Kong where teachers enjoy high social status and salary. My Master of Psychology research will include samples of Hong Kong and Australian senior high school students, to contrast their gender stereotypes as measured by Bem's Sex-Role Inventory (Bem, 1981), and how these, along with their gender and gender role orientations, affect their views of what characterises a good primary and secondary teacher, likelihood to consider teaching as a career, self-efficacy, and interests in teaching.
The theoretical framework integrates Lent et al.'s Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT; 1994) and research on gender stereotyping. SCCT posits that self-efficacies predict individuals' interests and intentions to persist in a given domain, which has not yet been applied to the context of teaching career choice. Research on gender stereotyping predicts that gender and conformity to gender role norms significantly shape individuals' learning experiences, which, in turn, affects self-efficacy (Toker et al., 2007). Recent research in the Chinese context has found that males and females exhibit fewer and weaker traditional gendered stereotypes (Zhang, Norvilitis, & Jin, 2001).We may reasonably infer shifting conceptions of gender stereotypes, including those associated with teachers, across cultures or time.
In the present paper, I report on the pilot study results from 120 senior high school survey participants in Hong Kong. Factor analyses and measures of Cronbach's measure of internal consistency will first explore the structure of gender stereotyped characteristics. Multiple regression analysis will examine the contributions of student gender, gender stereotypes, self-efficacy, and interest in teaching, towards intentions to teach. These findings will have

In recent decades, with an increasing application of computer technology to the delivery of oral language proficiency assessment, there have been renewed debates over the appropriateness of two different testing modes, namely, (a) face-to-face, or direct, testing, and (b) person-to-machine, or semi-direct, testing. Previous research conducted in various geographical regions has produced mixed results as to which format is more acceptable to test takers. The present investigation, carried out in the context of a university setting in Hong Kong, compared the popularity of two testing modes by analyzing reactions and perceptions of a group of test takers who had just sat for a direct test as well as a semi-direct test. The results indicate that, although a large proportion of the participants had no particular preference in terms of the testing mode, the number of participants who strongly favored direct testing far exceeded the number strongly favoring semi-direct testing. The participants' main reason cited for disliking semi-direct testing was its inability for the examiner and examinee to interact during the test, which appears to have created a psychological barrier for the test taker.
[Copyright of Language Assessment Quarterly is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15434300902800059]

This paper reports the findings of a study that investigates the attitudes of 555 boys and 493 girls towards the three official spoken languages used in postcolonial Hong Kong (i.e. Cantonese, English and Putonghua). The respondents started their secondary school education one year after the city was returned to the sovereignty of China from Britain. They were in their fourth year of studies at the time of this research. A questionnaire survey was conducted to find out how differently the two gender groups perceived the three target languages when they were repositioning themselves in the new sociopolitical context of Hong Kong. Informed by the quantitative results, group interviews were conducted to explore the reasons underlying the main attitudinal differences between the two genders. Similar to the research conducted in other parts of the world, female respondents were found to be consistently more positive than their male counterparts in their attitudes towards the non-native languages while male students were more positively inclined to the vernacular. Given the more accommodating attitudes of females to other languages, it is more likely that they will be the group who pushes Hong Kong forward towards a higher degree of multilingualism.
[Copyright of International Journal of Multilingualism is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/ijm068.0]