The effect of linguistic accuracy and spacing appeared in an essay on teachers' and external raters' grading was investigated by the author, and both factors were found influential, especially to external raters.

The author reports that a research was conducted to examine how English lessons were organized in junior forms in secondary schools in Hong Kong in order to find out whether schools situated in different socioeconomic and sociocultural contexts provided their Cantonese-speaking students with differential access to the socioeconomically dominant English linguistic and cultural resources in Hong Kong.

The author reports the findings of a study which involved 224 high intermediate level Chinese students enrolled in a higher diploma program in a Hong Kong tertiary institution participated: half of the students received a metacognitive strategy training; the treatment group outperformed the control group; the medium and low proficiency students benefited the most from the program.

To understand the concepts of coherence in writing, the author examined ten group reports. Assisting students in understanding the concept of coherent writing prior to their writing is found to be seemingly productive.

The written feedback to senior form students' compositions of 20 local teachers were investigated by the author, who found that teachers tended to be a grammarian as their focus was on accuracy and that, in providing comments, some teachers took over students' own ideas.

Two interactional strategies explicitly taught to learners of English in Hong Kong are how to check that the hearer understands what you are saying as you communicate and, conversely, how to check that you have understood another speaker's message. The forms of these strategies that are taught in Hong Kong schools are fairly limited. This study seeks, through examining authentic spoken discourse in the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE), to determine the ways in which these strategies are linguistically realised in real life communication, compared to the intuitions of materials writers that find their way into school textbooks. The findings suggest that more awareness of the realities of language use would be of benefit to textbook writers and teachers, enabling them to incorporate a wider and more accurate range of forms into their teaching materials, in order, in turn, to foster a more accurate awareness of language and language use in their learners. The approaches of corpus-driven research and data-driven learning are useful; through these, language learners can also become language researchers themselves, engaging themselves in the examination and analysis of corpus data.
[Copyright of Language Awareness is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/la455.0]

University instructors' classroom assessments play a central role in and inevitably influence their teaching and their students' learning. This paper reports on a comparative interview study conducted in a range of three ESL/EFL university contexts in Canada, Hong Kong and China. Six major aspects of ESL/EFL classroom assessment practices were explored: instructors' assessment planning for the courses they taught, the relative weight given to course work and tests in their instruction, the type of assessment methods (selection vs. supply methods) that they used, the purposes each assessment was used for, the source of each method used, and when they used each method. University instructors were also asked to indicate what they saw as the advantages and disadvantages of the methods they used, and whether they took into account prior student knowledge when making decisions about what assessment methods to use. The findings contribute to a better understanding of ESL/EFL university instructors' classroom assessment practices at the tertiary level in a range of three ESL/EFL university teaching contexts.
[Copyright of Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02602930601122555]