To examine whether greater freedom given to students in choosing their home and class assignments would motivate their learning, the author conducted an experiment in a class of F.3 students, and found that students reacted variously to the choices of assignment.

The author reports that a group of social work undergraduate students enrolled in the English for Academic Purpose (EAP) course in Hong Kong Baptist University was surveyed, and that how students viewed the purposes, reliability, tasks, scoring criteria, and marking procedures was studied. The author suggested that EAP teachers should collaborate with other content subject teachers in designing test tasks and scoring criteria.

Based on the theories of Protocol Analysis and Contrastive Analysis and Protocol Analysis, the author investigated how a foreign language learner was affected by his/her mother tongue and how psychological factors accounted for the causes of students' errors. The author discovered that Cantonese transfer caused mistakes made in the English composition of the S.1 students, and that the mother tongue transfer effect decreased from S.1 to S.5.

In comparing four discussions of non-native speakers and another four discussions of native and non-native speakers, the author found that the varieties of the communication approaches used were similar but the frequency fell in the presence of native speakers.

Based on review of the official records in the Hong Kong Extensive Reading Scheme and the internal examination results and Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examination results of a group of S.5 students, the author found that the quantity of extra-curricular reading correlated with the writing performance.

A qualitative study of perception of workload found that it was very weakly related to hours of work. The complex construct was better characterised as being influenced by a broadly conceived teaching and learning environment. It appeared to be possible to encourage students to perform a great deal of high-quality work, without complaining about excessive workload, by attention to this environment. This hypothesis was tested quantitatively with structural equation modelling with a sample of 3320 undergraduate students at a university in Hong Kong. The hypothesised model had nine factors of the teaching and learning environment grouped under three higher-order latent variables: teaching, teacher?student relationships and student?student relationships which have influences on perceived workload. The model showed a good fit to the data, confirming the hypothesis that attention to the teaching and learning environment can spur students to work hard without feeling overly stressed. The questionnaire could be used as a diagnostic tool to discover which aspects of the environment need attention.
[Copyright of Studies in Higher Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075070600572074]