The authors report the findings of their study conducted to investigate the difficulties anticipated and experienced by in-service English teachers when carrying out task-based teaching in their schools. The authors conclude that the difficulties perceived by the teachers before they did the task-based teaching were greater than those that they actually experienced in the classroom.

This paper reports a study that aims to explore the multifaceted roles of teachers under the curriculum change of Target Oriented Curriculum (TOC). By reviewing the related papers and documents, the principles of learning of TOC and how this initiative works in actual practice are conceptualized. Then, some objective criteria concerning the professional qualities and expertise required of TOC teachers are deduced, and implications of TOC for teacher education are discussed.

The authors report that, aiming at providing a body of content knowledge and pedagogic content knowledge relevant to English language teaching, "Telegram," an electronic grammar database for English as a second language teachers in Hong Kong, was designed. The essentials of explicit grammatical knowledge in efficient language teaching is then discussed.

The paper reports that, to assist in the continuous professional development of English as a Second Language teachers in Hong Kong, a computer network "TeleNex" has been set up. The concept of teacher development is then suggested to encompass the developments of knowledge skills, a cooperative culture, and the teacher as a person.

*The importance of practicum to help student teachers teach English as a medium of instruction is discussed in the paper. The author reports that, to prepare student teachers more for the practice teaching period, an additional period is designed in a Hong Kong teacher training program by allowing the involved student teachers to interact with the cooperating teachers in advance.

A course which aims at exploring the concept of "discourse communities" to English teachers in Hong Kong is described in this paper.

The author points out in the paper the followings: drawings by children of different races and culture show similarities in representations of similar objects. Yet, after seven years of age, the drawings of a European child show subject realism and their representations are mental pictures; the Chinese child's drawings are remarkable not only for their realism, but also for the sense of relations between parts. To the author, the two types of experiences are due to their different training in perception.

Teachers beliefs about their ability to affect students' performance is an important part of professionalism. This study compared 725 Hong Kong and 575 Shanghai primary in-service teachers on their teacher efficacy. Two Chinese versions of the 12-item Teachers' Sense of Efficacy Scale were used in this study since some wordings of the Hong Kong version of the Scale (HK-TSE) were different from the Shanghai version (STSE) as a result of cultural differences. Basically, the Shanghai teachers reported significantly higher efficacy than did the Hong Kong teachers. After reviewing these quantitative results, 86 follow-up questionnaires from Shanghai in-service teachers who also participated in the first part of this study were collected. Results of this qualitative part showed that the three most commonly cited factors for the contribution of teacher efficacy were: respect and confidence placed in them by students and parents, the training they received from universities and the experience they gained from daily teaching practice. Though Hong Kong in-service teachers had lower efficacy scores than the Shanghai counterparts.
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This paper provides a case study of the use of language objectives within a newly developed English language teacher education programme in Hong Kong. The programme development team decided to adopt a content-based language teaching approach to support students' second language development through content learning. The teacher education programme (the content) prepares Chinese-speaking students to become secondary level English teachers. Because of students' level of English language proficiency upon entry, the programme must provide substantial support for students' English language development in addition to their learning of subject content knowledge and ELT pedagogy. There is also a government-stipulated proficiency level for all qualified English language teachers, which essentially becomes the language syllabus for the programme. The language objectives serve as a medium for mapping the language syllabus on the content curriculum. There are reasons to believe that the approach adopted has been successful in supporting students' language and content learning. This paper describes the programme development and implementation process and the problems and constraints met. The paper also shares the lessons learnt from the curriculum development and implementation process.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/le771.0]