This paper aims at describing and explaining how drama pedagogy is appropriated in Chinese language classrooms in Hong Kong. Drawing on the theories of dialogue and appropriation of Mikhail Bakhtin, the research shows that the dialogicality of drama in Hong Kong's classrooms is conditional, and therefore deviant from the conventional as conceptualised and described in the major literature. A spectrum of the appropriation of drama pedagogy in language classrooms in Hong Kong is developed and discussed. At one end of the spectrum, there is still the domination of the teacher's monologic input of official knowledge and skills; at the other end, destabilisation of the centrality of the text and the authoritarian role of the teacher is identified suggesting alteration in the classroom communication routine, and even the opening of the drama world. This spectrum illustrates how the teachers waver between persisting with monologue and embracing dialogue, the result of which is the development of a hybrid approach to appropriate drama pedagogy.
[Copyright of Pedagogy, Culture & Society is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2010.505717]

Background: Recent government initiatives in Hong Kong have focused on raising the participation of students from South Asian backgrounds in mainstream schools, to encourage their further integration into Hong Kong's educational system and society. These students' learning in mainstream schools takes place within the context of the central curriculum and, thus, students face the challenge of learning Chinese as an additional language. Mainstream schools sometimes provide additional support, including the provision of bilingual teaching assistants to address the specific needs of the students from South Asian backgrounds.
Purpose: This exploratory study aims to investigate the roles of bilingual teaching assistants in Hong Kong.
Method: Interviews were held with two bilingual teaching assistants from the South Asian community in Hong Kong who were working in a mainstream secondary school. Teachers from the school were also interviewed. Open-ended interview questions focused on perceptions of the roles and responsibilities of bilingual teaching assistants in Chinese-language-medium classes. The data were analysed to identify any emergent patterns and themes.
Findings: The research findings indicate that the bilingual teaching assistants from the South Asian community not only took on the role of helping the learners from South Asian backgrounds in Chinese language acquisition, but also acted as cultural mediators between mainstream school culture and the culture of the South Asian community in Hong Kong.
Conclusions: This small-scale exploratory research study suggests the importance of the role of bilingual teaching assistants in promoting equal access to quality education for ethnic minorities in Hong Kong.
[Copyright of Educational Research is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131881.2010.524753]

This study was originally designed to explore the impact of a distributed approach to developing curriculum leadership among schoolteachers. Previous papers have focused on reporting evidence of teacher learning in the process of engaging teachers in various types of curriculum decision-making in an innovation project based on interview data. This article reports a discourse analysis of the interactions based on the visual data in videotaped meetings between teachers in a Chinese curriculum development team and shows that teacher participation is constrained by the leadership styles of the positional leaders in the team in the second action cycle in the project. The mediational effects of the leadership styles invite policy-makers and school management to rethink the effectiveness of school-based approaches to curriculum development in enhancing teacher learning and development.
[Copyright of Curriculum Journal is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09585176.2010.504577]

Dyslexia appears to be the most prevalent disability of students with special educational needs in many mainstream classes, affecting around 9.7% of the school population in Hong Kong. The education of these students is therefore of great concern to the community. In the present paper research into dyslexia in the Chinese language is briefly reviewed, with emphasis on the cognitive characteristics of dyslexia and its manifestations, in the hope that understanding the profiles of students with dyslexia may help to lay a solid foundation for assessment, curriculum development and intervention. Recent progress in the study of the cognitive deficits of Chinese-speaking readers with dyslexia in Hong Kong and the development of assessment and intervention framework for early identification and intervention is presented. These developments shed light on dyslexia in the Chinese language and provide grounds for further work on research and practice.
[Copyright of Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19404158.2010.495830]

This study investigated the effectiveness of the integrative perceptual approach (IPA) to enhancing Hong Kong kindergarten children's Chinese character learning. The study applied the IPA to an experimental group of 29 lower form (K2) children. A group of 30 upper form children taught via traditional methods the year before, served as the control group. Quantitative data consisted of pre- and post-test scores, analysed using dependent and independent t-testing. It was found that the pupils in the experimental group had significantly improved their ability between pre- and post-testing in three aspects of Chinese character mastery: shape, sound and meaning recognition. The progress made was significantly superior to that made by control group counterparts. Qualitative data gathered through teacher and parent interviews indicated that the pupils in the experimental group displayed increased awareness of the composition of several components and structures of Chinese characters.
[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/10.1080/03004431003768006]