This study followed 88 children in Beijing and Hong Kong for three years to investigate the relationships between the early teaching of literacy skills and later literacy outcomes. The children were administered the Preschool and Primary Chinese Literacy Scale at the age of five years, and three years later. Their parents and teachers reported on their involvement in literacy teaching, the home/classroom literacy environment and their beliefs about language learning. Findings showed that the Hong Kong cohort significantly surpassed their Beijing counterparts in literacy attainments at age five and age eight. After controlling for age, site, maternal education and teacher qualification, formal literacy activities in early childhood significantly contributed to literacy attainment at primary school, whereas informal literacy experiences did not. Results suggest that the complicated nature of Chinese orthography may make early instruction particularly valuable in Chinese literacy acquisition. The psycholinguistic, pedagogical and sociocontextual accounts and implications of these findings are discussed.
[Copyright of Early Child Development and Care is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03004430600789365]

This article reports the development of a teacher self-efficacy scale that aims to accommodate the complexity of teacher functioning in secondary schools in times of education reforms in Hong Kong. The scale was designed to assess six domains of teacher self-efficacy: teaching highly able learners, classroom management, guidance and counselling, student engagement, teaching to accommodate diversity, and teaching for enriched learning. The total scale and the six subscales were evaluated based on the responses of 159 Hong Kong Chinese prospective and in-service teachers for internal consistency and construct validity, and for convergent and discriminant validation with external measures.
[Copyright of Educational Psychology is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01443410701491833]

Curriculum reform in Hong Kong is one facet of a broad systemic reform variously explained in terms of addressing a changing sovereignty or more recently, of servicing Hong Kong's economic growth. One initiative supporting this curriculum reform entitled Assessment for Learning seeks to promote formative assessment. Three case studies, of teachers within their Hong Kong classrooms seeking to implement formative assessment, serve to highlight a curious contradiction: caring teachers who appear to work against curriculum reform. To explain this contradiction we offer a three-point philosophical framework comprising Confucianism, Daoism and pragmatism, which provides an answer to our central question: curriculum reform in the Hong Kong primary classroom: what gives?
[Copyright of Music Education Research is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14613800802079122]

This paper discusses the concept of 'cultural cross‐currents,' their implicit nature and the potential they have to effect second language literacy learning, teaching and curriculum reform in Hong Kong primary classrooms. Despite the substantive implications for learning, the exploration of cultural influences upon teacher and student thinking and the resultant educational consequences, remains a largely unrecognized area. The central argument in the paper is that cultural differences in attitudes, beliefs and values of cultural groups toward the way first and second languages are acquired needs to be made explicit in order to facilitate second language literacy teaching and learning.
[Copyright of Intercultural Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14675980600693947]