This research delves into the washback effects of the Hong Kong Diploma of Education Examination (HKDSE) on the learning strategies employed by secondary school students in Hong Kong. By surveying 50 students to assess their English learning strategy profiles, this study seeks to identify potential biases in strategy selection indicative of examination influence. A subset of participants was further interviewed, enabling a deeper exploration of the underlying reasons behind their strategy choices. Thematic analysis of these interviews revealed that while students recognize the intended washback of the examination on their learning strategies, its actual influence might be diminished by their reservations regarding high stakes testing's effect on authentic English learning. The overarching sentiment expressed frustrations and conflict between the study of English language, and exam-centric pressures. Copyright ©2024 King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi School of Liberal Arts.

The present study used functional analysis and tested for the effects of a treatment package on the increase of play and decrease of stereotypy with a student with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who attended an inclusive international school in Hong Kong. The treatment package was a partial replication of a toy conditioning procedure from Tsai Greer (2006). The play used was games on an iPad. The functional analysis conducted suggested that the high rates of stereotypy observed were being maintained through automatic reinforcement. Furthermore, the student was chosen to be in this study due to his observed high rates of stereotypy and limited community of reinforcers. Results show a correlation between the play conditioning procedure and subsequent reduction in stereotypy. Copyright ©2024 Mercy College New York.

This paper reports an intervention study in the teaching of fraction concepts at a village school in Hong Kong. The classes consisted of 60 Grade three students with different cultural backgrounds, including African, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Nepalese, and Pakistani. The study represents one of the relatively few studies that investigate the effectiveness of storytelling in teaching mathematics to ethnic minority (EM) students in the East Asian context. The quantitative analysis in a pre/post-test intervention/control group design shows reduction in achievement gap between EM students in rural settings and their Chinese peers in urban districts, including concepts such as part--"whole interpretation," "fraction language," and "mathematics vocabulary." Analysis of classroom discourse based on the culturally responsive mathematics teaching (CRMT) framework reveals the multimodal features of storytelling provide greater access for EM students in acquiring language-related conceptualizations of fractions. Based on our analysis, we argue that mathematics teaching is inseparable from language teaching, which is often ignored or not planned explicitly in the lesson. Storytelling integrates language with mathematics content authentically and allows students to cope with the language demands in learning mathematics and to encounter the mathematics in real-world context. Copyright ©2024 Springer.

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools have become a popular topic in the education field. Most of the schools in Hong Kong focus on how to properly use AI software to help students' learning experience. As this is still a relatively new technology, the stance for most of the schools in Hong Kong is skeptical. This study aims to find out whether AI-generative tools, such as ChatGPT, can help to improve students' English writing skills in university. Interviews were used to find out students and teachers' opinions towards using AI in writing. The results indicate that students find AI tools convenient for learning writing skills, but teachers are concerned that the feedback and examples provided by AI are too general and ambiguous. This study provides some interesting opinions from students and teachers about their experience using AI in learning and writing and helps us to understand more about how to use AI effectively in the education sector. Copyright ©2024 Online Learning Consortium.

The purpose of civic education is to prepare students to become ‘good citizens’ aligned with the policies and political purposes of the regime to which they belong. This exploratory study employed a mixed methods design to construct a typology of ‘good citizens’ to understand university students’ perceptions of citizenship in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Mainland China. It found that the university students’ perceptions of ‘good citizens’ is constructed from two components: internal political efficacy and the connection between ‘good citizens’ and the regime. Students in these societies share a similar understanding of the first component but have significant divergences in the second component. These findings demonstrate a correlation between regime type and the perceptions of ‘good citizens’ and our typology could provide a conceptual framework to guide researchers in organising and conducting further comparative studies. Copyright ©2024 Routledge.

Research with economic utility and social value has been increasingly valued. Such an emphasis can be evidenced by the newly included assessment element of 'societal impact' in performance-based research funding (PBRF) schemes in different higher education systems around the world. This paper investigates how the non-academic impact is constructed and perceived in the Hong Kong Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2020, taking into account the local socio-cultural characteristics in the context of Hong Kong. Data sources include 13 impact case studies in the education panel submitted for the Hong Kong RAE 2020 and semi-structured interview with 17 education academics in Hong Kong. Findings revealed that the non-academic impact was constructed through a narrative pattern: (1) problem identification: tensions and synergies between local and international discourse; (2) problem resolution: prioritization of the evidence-based applied education research (with funding); (3) resolution dissemination: strategic employment of promotional genre. The paper discusses how decolonization, academic entrepreneurialism and collectivist culture have characterized the framing and understanding of the non-academic impact in the Hong Kong academia, contributing to the discourse on neoliberalism in higher education by providing a nuanced, local perspective on the impact agenda. Policy implications for a more localized and flexible impact agenda are also provided. Copyright ©2024 Oxford University Press.

This article examines the intertwining and evolution of neoliberal and nationalist discourses in post-colonial Hong Kong and Macao, arguing that their combination reveals the dual layers of political rationality in the dynamics of higher education policymaking. It suggests a move towards governmentality with Chinese characteristics, marked by gradual and continuous shifts towards decolonisation and re-Sinicisation within the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ framework. This perspective contrasts with existing literature on Hong Kong that emphasises the maintenance of the colonial status quo and points out abrupt changes due to the 2019 protests and the 2020 National Security Law. By analysing the reconfiguration of governmentality in the higher education systems of these post-colonial Chinese societies amid changing political landscapes, the article sheds light on both the incremental changes and significant moments influencing the trajectory of higher education development in Hong Kong and Macao. Copyright ©2024 Routledge.

This paper contributes to our conceptualization of linguistic identities in English as a lingua franca (ELF) communication by analyzing a group of multilingual international students' narrativized accounts of their ELF communication experiences in an international university in Hong Kong. The findings of the study indicate that despite their status as L2 speakers, the participants considered themselves as legitimate speakers of English when interacting with others through ELF. Moreover, they oriented to their national cultural identities and personal identities indexed through their accents in ELF communication. Their frequent use of ELF with other students from diverse linguacultural backgrounds also prompted them to identify positively with a local ELF-using community and envision their imagined identities as members of a global ELF-using community. The findings further reveal that the participants' ELF communication experiences opened up a space for them to take on new and alternative L2-speaking personal identities which they perceived to be markedly different from and more desirable than their L1-based selves. Overall, the analysis provides empirical support for applying a tripartite model of linguistic identity for understanding ELF communication experiences and calls attention to the multidimensional nature of linguistic identities and the interrelatedness between different dimensions of linguistic identities in ELF communication. Copyright ©2024 Routledge.

One type of teacher collaboration termed co-teaching has been gaining popularity in many Asian educational contexts such as Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. The benefits and problems of the co-teaching between a native-English-speaking teacher (NEST) and non-native-English-speaking teacher (NNEST) have been extensively documented in research (e.g., Carless & Walker, 2006; Copland, Davis, Garton, and Mann, 2016). Still, this current study identified research gaps. First, the actual effectiveness of co-teaching as measured by student achievement seemed rare. Second, a quantitative analysis of how two important factors, co-teaching style and co-planning time, actually influenced student achievement during co-teaching was scarce. Third, a detailed qualitative classroom description of how the teachers specifically utilized their strengths in co-teaching practices had not been documented. This study recruited 27 teachers (NESTs and NNESTs) and 270 5th graders in Taiwan. It was found that students’ listening improved after being co-taught for 1 year. In addition, the co-teaching style and the co-planning time influenced students’ listening proficiency differently. Lastly, both qualitative and quantitative results showed that the joint-led teaching style with teachers who co-planned between 2–4 h provided the best results in students’ listening proficiency. Copyright ©2024 National Taiwan Normal University. Department of English.

Metadiscourse plays a significant role in determining the quality of writing. While a growing number of studies have investigated the use of metadiscourse by adult second language learners in academic writing at the tertiary level, studies on how secondary-level students adopt such linguistic resources in other genres, particularly in examination writing, remain few. The present study addresses this research gap by examining the distributions of metadiscourse markers in a corpus of 120 low-, medium-, and high-rated advice-giving texts (letters and reports) randomly selected from the Hong Kong public examination of English language writing, written by secondary-level Chinese learners of English. Using Hyland’s (2019) framework of metadiscourse, the study found considerable variation in the use of interactive and interactional metadiscourse across genres (letters vs. reports) and the final exam grades awarded to texts. Implications for teaching English to pre-tertiary Chinese writers are discussed with suggestions for future research. Copyright ©2024 De Gruyter.