Researchers have discussed Hong Kong’s localist identities, nativist sentiments, and populism, but have not widely examined the extent to which populism could be perceived in education in Hong Kong. As the chief participants of the Occupying Central and the radical Anti-Extradition Bill movements in Hong Kong were students, this suggests the need to explore the relationship between populism and education, particularly the then-controversial liberal studies textbooks. According to contemporary news reports, liberal studies textbooks contained much content stigmatising the Chinese mainland. Previous studies of liberal studies textbooks applied qualitative discourse analysis methods. In this study, mixed-method analysis was applied to a specialised corpus comprising seven commercial liberal studies textbooks containing 248,339 Chinese characters in total to explore the extent to which liberal studies textbooks contain information concerning the key features of populism—the heightened division between the inner and outer groups. A division was found between positive images of Hong Kong and negative images of China in the narratives of commercial liberal studies textbooks. Accordingly, the textbooks can be understood to contain populism. The present study advocates that relevant educational watchdogs in Hong Kong provide more guidance on the writing and publishing of liberal studies textbooks in the future, keeping the enquiry-based spirit of the liberal studies course fulfilled, and urges stakeholders of Hong Kong education to consider teaching peace education and developing a more inclusive environment. © 2023 by the author(s).

This study sought to investigate the impact of world Englishes (WE) and English as a lingua franca (ELF) research on Hong Kong's ELT curricula and textbooks over the past four decades in three areas: (1) language standards, norms and models; (2) language and intercultural awareness; and (3) strategies for international communication. Based on qualitative and quantitative content analysis, the findings suggest that WE/ELF research has influenced Hong Kong's English language education mainly by accommodating to the changing role of English (from a colonial to international language) and the evolving language use contexts, but there has been little engagement with the pluricentric view of language varieties and variation. The paper offers suggestions to initiate changes that could better accommodate WE/ELF research in the gradual ELT development. Copyright ©Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

教科書是教育的重要環節，聯繫教學內容、系統知識、課程與教學、學習評估。香港教科書編審和選用的機制，雖然一直引發大量爭議，但探討其機制的文章不多。本文將評析教育局在教科書編審機制的特質。教育局在編審過程中，對特定項目加以控制，如編寫內容、編寫取向、價格因素等；然而，對部分項目則容許自由編寫，如附加內容、教學活動、撰寫篇幅等。出版商為爭取通過評審，獲得更大市場份額，需要滿足教育局的要求和學校教師的口味。在選用過程中，學校需要建立選用教科書的方法，經教師商議選用，但教育局未擬定教師選用準則的嚴格標準，教師選擇具有彈性。筆者認為，香港教科書編審和選用的機制中，教育局的取態經常徘徊於控制與自由之間。Textbook, linking teaching content, system knowledge, curriculum and teaching, and assessment for learning, is an important part of education. Although the mechanism for reviewing and selecting textbooks in Hong Kong has always caused a lot of controversy, there are not many articles inquiring into the mechanism. This article analyzes the features of the textbook review mechanism of the Education Bureau. During the review processes, the Education Bureau, on the one hand, controls specific issues such as contents, teaching approaches, and pricing matters. It, however, allows freedom in other issues such as supplementary contents, teaching activities, length of writings. Textbook publishers, aiming to gain greater market share, need to meet the requirements of the Education Bureau and the desires of school teachers. In the selection process, schools need to set the procedure of textbook selection and allow teachers to select textbook. The Education Bureau, however, has not issued rigid standards for the selection and allows flexibility for teachers’ choice. The author believes that the Education Bureau often hovers between control and freedom.in the textbook review and selection mechanism. Copyright © 2019 香港中文大學.

In Hong Kong, the new Senior Secondary curriculum was introduced at Secondary 4 level in September 2009. The curriculum documents emphasize that textbooks not only provide the core elements of learning in the subjects but should also be designed to develop students’ critical and creative thinking and other generic skills through the information and activities they provide. In addition, textbooks should provide a ‘one-stop shop’ of teaching materials so as to help teachers plan the scope and sequence of their lessons. As teachers still rely on textbooks as an important source of information to support their teaching, all textbooks for Senior Secondary Education have been rewritten for the new curriculum. In this paper, the author presents a case study which aimed to develop a framework for designing a new set of Senior Secondary Information and Communication Technology (ICT) textbooks for use by Hong Kong students. In the study, the author conducted a documentary analysis of textbooks pertaining to the previous version of the curriculum, and interviewed experienced teachers, both in order to examine the design strategies for the new textbooks. The paper also discusses how supplementary teaching materials can be used to support learning, teaching and assessment.
[Copyright © 2011 Common Ground, Yiu Chi Lai, All Rights Reserved.]

This article seeks to investigate whether the improvement of the status of women in Hong Kong in recent decades, effected through various efforts to promote the values of equal opportunity concepts, is reflected in patterns of gender representation in primary school textbooks used in Hong Kong. A comparison of a popular series of primary school English-language textbooks that was published in 2005 with the same series published in 1988 (12 books in total) revealed increase in gender equity in the more recent books, including increased visibility of women both visually and textually. Nevertheless, the findings also revealed a perpetuation of some stereotyped images of the two genders and portrayals of women in a more limited range of social roles than men. The 'male-first' phenomenon and the visual and textual under-representation of women were still prevalent in the contemporary textbooks. The potential impacts on children of unbalanced gender representation in textbooks are discussed within the framework of social cognitive theory.
[Copyright of Gender & Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2014.916400]