This paper investigates mainland Chinese students? experiences of learning English as a second language (L2) in a multilingual university in Hong Kong, with particular attention to their negotiation of participation and identity. Drawing on a series of in-depth interviews with a group of mainland Chinese students, the study revealed that their participation in L2 practices appeared to be shaped by the contextual conditions in different communities within the university and mediated by their agentic responses to the contextual realities of these communities. While they gained fuller participation in L2-mediated activities in the local student community and the classroom community as a result of their appropriation of the associated language practices and their display of knowledge and competence in the related social practices, they struggled to gain access to L2 interactional opportunities in the community of exchange students, where their negotiation of positionalities was subject to the perceived unequal power relations between native and non-native speakers of the English. It is argued that their participation in L2-mediated activities in the university could be understood as a complex, dynamic, situated and co-constructed process of negotiating access, competence, membership, positionality, identities and discursive practices associated with different communities.
[Copyright of Research Papers in Education is the property of Routledge.]

This study explores how master's students perceive their learning experiences and build their identities as postgraduate learners. It also investigates how these students' perceptions affect their aspirations regarding academic careers. By applying the Community of Practice (CoP) framework, this study focuses on three dimensions of master's students' experience; community, practice and identity. Seventy master's students from one research-intensive university in Hong Kong were interviewed regarding motivations for doing a master's degree and reflections on learning. The interview results showed that master's students build their communities partly around shared academic interests. However, the boundaries of these communities are loose and flexible, due to the nature of master's programmes with their short periods of study and large numbers of part-time students. The study also showed how master's students develop their knowledge and skills through doing research and how they evaluate the prospect of becoming an academic.
[Copyright of Studies in Higher Education is the property of Routledge.]

This study offers an in-depth understanding of acculturative experiences among a group of Pakistani secondary school students in Hong Kong. The study findings seek to report the various ways in which the research participants experience acculturation in the familial, communal, educational, and societal contexts and identify the various factors that facilitate or hinder their acculturation to mainstream society. The study employed a culture learning approach and adopted a strength-based perspective to understand the lived acculturative experiences of first-generation and second-generation Pakistani students (n-16) attending six different secondary schools in Hong Kong. Phenomenography as research methodology guided the study, and data was collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews. The phenomenographic data analysis aided by Nvivo software resulted in twenty-eight categories representing the different ways in which the research participants experience acculturation. The three findings chapters delineate what and how the participants learn about their heritage culture (enculturation) as well as other cultures (acculturation) and what factors hinder their acculturation to the mainstream society. While growing up in the multicultural city of Hong Kong, the research participants not only learn about their social identities and acquire multiple languages but also learn about their heritage culture and other cultures. Although all the participants make sense of their social identities differently, their place of birth, ethnicity, nationality, and religious affiliation shape their hyphenated identities. The acquisition of linguistic capital in multiple languages, including mother tongue, Urdu, English, Cantonese, and Arabic, facilitate their learning about heritage culture and other cultures. Their everyday socialization across the social settings results in both their enculturation as well as acculturation.Within the familial context, language preferences, dietary

1965至1985年間，香港高等教育的發展相當緩慢，只有不足5%的適齡青年可升讀由大學教育資助委員會資助的大學學位課程，及至20世紀80年代中起，大學學位開始大量增加，進入大學的適齡人口百分比提升至18%。2000年，香港特別行政區行政長官更進一步提出要在十年內令香港高等教育的普及率達到60%。由2000–2001至2005–2006學年，高等教育參與率已增加至超過60%。本文探討在香港高等教育擴張後期，中學生對升讀高等教育期望的變化。本文研究數據來自2009年和2012年的學生能力國際評估計劃（以下簡稱PISA）。2009年香港的PISA調查在該年5至6月間進行，而2012年的調查則在該年4至5月間進行。本研究嘗試探索以下四個範疇：（1）學生的教育期望在兩次調查期間（2009至2012年）的變化；（2）學生的家庭社經背景與教育期望間的關係；（3）學生能力與教育期望間的關係；（4）家庭社經背景與學生能力等因素對學生期望升讀大學的相對影響程度。From 1965 to 1985, the development of higher education was very slow in Hong Kong. Less than 5% of age-eligible adolescents were admitted to UGC-funded university degree program. However, since the mid-1980s, there has been an expansion of university places and the university admission rate has increased to 18% of the age-eligible population. In 2000, the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region proposed that the admission rate of higher education be increased to 60% within ten years. As a consequence, the participation rate of higher education was increased to over 60% from the school year 2000–2001 to 2005–2006. This article focuses on the change in expectation for pursuing higher education of Hong Kong secondary school students during the post-massification of Hong Kong higher education.The data of this article originates from two cycles of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) — PISA 2009 and PISA 2012. PISA 2009 in Hong Kong was conducted from May to June 2009, while PISA 2012 was conducted from April to May 2012. This article attempts to investigate the following four areas: (1) the changes in students’ educational expectation during 2009 to 2012; (2) the relationship between students’ family socioeconomic background and their educational expectation; (3) the relationship between students’ ability and their educational expectation; (4) the relative impact of family socioeconomic background and students’ ability on their educational expectation toward the pursuit of university education. Copyright © 2009

本文從一名內部人士的視角來說明在香港參與補習的生活經歷，分別以學生、補習導師和研究人員的角色，對影子教育普遍存在的幾個問題給予分析並獲得啟示。本文採用自傳式敘事研究方法，數據來源於作者的事件回憶錄，受啟發於自身作為學員和導師時使用的教材、自己的視頻錄課，以及研究項目的反思日記。基於作者在補習行業扮演不同角色的敘述，本文討論了幾個主要問題，包括(1)影子教育對主流教育積極和消極影響的反思，(2)缺乏對補習教師和廣告質量的嚴格規範，(3)影子教育如何加劇教育不平等以及一些補習機構和非營利組織如何解決這一問題。就作者所知，本文是唯一一篇從作者自身作為學生、導師和研究人員的個人經歷來討論影子教育問題的文章，它從內部人士視角闡述了香港補習行業的實踐和政策發展。 This article aims to illustrate the lived experiences of engaging in private tutoring in Hong Kong as a tutee, a tutor, and a researcher and draw implications on several issues arising from the prevalence of shadow education. This article adopted an autobiographical narrative approach. Data were collected through the author’s memoir of events, stimulated by the tutorial materials he used when he was a tutee and a tutor, his video-recorded lessons of tutoring, and reflective journals from his research projects. Various issues are discussed based on the narrative of the author playing different roles in the tutoring industry, including the positive and negative washback on mainstream education; the lack of strict regulation of the quality of tutors and advertisements; how shadow education may exacerbate education inequality; and how some tutorial companies and nonprofit organizations are addressing the issue. This article, to the best of the author’s knowledge, is the only one that discusses the problems of shadow education from an author’s own personal experiences as a tutee, a tutor, and a researcher. It illustrates how practices and policies of the private tutoring industry are evolving in Hong Kong from an insider perspective. Copyright © 2020 華東師範大學.

Private tutoring is one of the unintended outcomes of high-stakes testing and has become a widespread global phenomenon. It is called shadow education because it mimics the mainstream curriculum. From the critical perspective, this study investigated the role of private tutoring in a context of high-stakes testing through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. It explored 18 Secondary Six (Grade 12) students’ reflections on their learning experiences in private tutoring in Hong Kong for one year. Conceptualized with Freire’s Pedagogy of the oppressed, the findings reveal that while students are being oppressed in the washback of high-stakes testing under neoliberalism, shadow education further oppresses the students by (1) intensifying the “banking” concept of education, (2) teaching as the “authority”, (3) emphasizing performativity and (4) offering “false generosity”. The findings provide implications for potential educational change in contexts where education systems increasingly rely on accountability and selection through high-stakes testing. By problematizing the role of private tutoring through the conceptual lens of oppression, the study calls for research to take a closer look at the impact of shadow education on learners’ experiences in the current neoliberal era. Copyright © 2020 National Institute of Education, Singapore.

In many Asian countries and increasingly in the West, primary and secondary school students receive private tutoring, often in the form of lectures in cram schools. As English is an international lingua franca, many students enroll in English courses after school. Students enrolled in English private tutoring (EPT) are often examination-driven and extrinsically motivated to learn English, but past studies have not examined whether they like EPT lessons. Hence, we integrate motivation and tutoring into a theoretical model of EPT enjoyment at different levels (student, family, teacher, tutoring) and empirically test it with the survey responses of 543 Secondary Six (Grade 12) students enrolled in EPT courses in cram schools. The findings show that most Secondary Six students in Hong Kong like EPT lessons. Family, reasons for tutoring, tutoring, and student attributes are linked to EPT enjoyment. These students are more likely to like EPT if they (a) are in families perceived to have superior financial resources, (b) are not influenced by advertisements or other people to join EPT lessons, (c) attend face-to-face tutoring, (d) have a specific tutor, (e) like the tutor more than their teachers, (f) are interested in English, or (g) have greater English self-concept. The results of this study can contribute to our understanding of which motivation and tutoring factors affect students' enjoyment of EPT and inform EPT improvements. Copyright © 2020 De La Salle University.

School-based counselling is an effective intervention for psychological distress in adolescents, but little is known about the processes leading to a therapeutic change in a Chinese sociocultural context. Twenty-five Chinese senior secondary school students and eight school counsellors in Hong Kong were interviewed, and the data were analysed thematically within a critical realist paradigm. Three change processes were developed: new ways of thinking, developing better relationships and experiencing positive emotions. The study's findings were broadly consistent with previous research into school-based counselling in Western contexts but not consistent with previous studies carried out with adult Chinese clients. Counselling in schools has the potential to deliver significant benefits to adolescents in Hong Kong. Copyright © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

The general university requirements (GUR) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) is an integral part of the new 4-year undergraduate curriculum. To evaluate GUR, a longitudinal case study involving 42 cases from different faculties/schools was conducted, with several interviews conducted with the informants over time. The present article is to report the findings of the second year evaluation. Three major observations on students' views about the effectiveness of GUR study were generated from the study, including 1) broadened horizons; 2) increased awareness of the connection between GUR study and all-round development and 3) urge of linking GUR components with one's profession. The longitudinal case study findings suggest that students generally had fruitful learning experiences in GUR study. This study helps to paint a more complete picture of students' views toward GUR and their personal development.
[Copyright of International Journal of Child and Adolescent Health is the property of Nova Science Publishers, Inc.]

In the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment, students from Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taipei, where the classroom disciplinary climate of schools was relatively strict, were top performers in mathematics. In this study, two-level linear analyses showed that the classroom disciplinary climate of schools significantly affected student mathematics achievement in the four Chinese economies, indicating that school and economy-level inequality were related to the classroom disciplinary climate of schools. Additionally, residual analyses showed that students in different percentiles within economies, as well as students in the same percentiles of different economies, benefited or hindered differently from classroom disciplinary climate of schools, hinting at shrinking individual-level differences in student mathematics achievement. Most students in Shanghai and Hong Kong benefited from an orderly disciplinary climate in their schools, particularly medium and high performers in Shanghai, while most students in Taipei and Macao suffered from a disruptive disciplinary climate in their schools. Statistically, Taipei would replace Shanghai and top the four Chinese economies in student mathematics performance if all schools in the four had a disciplinary climate similar to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average.
[Copyright of Asia Pacific Education Review is the property of Springer Netherlands.]