Gender stereotyping has long been an issue for gender and language research from as early as the 1970s, and analyses on gender representation in English language textbooks have been frequently conducted. However, gender representation in assessment papers, another commonly occurring genre in education, remains unexplored in Hong Kong research. Therefore, this paper was aimed to explore how males and females are represented in Territory-wide System Assessment (TSA), a territory-level assessment administered in Hong Kong, to find out if gender stereotyping is still an issue. The data of the current study include the recent 10 years of TSA Primary 3 English Language Reading & Writing papers. A total of 33 sets of TSA Primary 3 English Language Reading & Writing papers was analysed by using content and linguistic analyses for their written texts and visual analysis for visual elements. The key findings include: males and females are represented similarly in the written texts and in the visuals, and females are portrayed as involving in occupational roles more frequently than males in both the written texts and visuals. However, it is always females who were drawn to be focused on family matters, and the marital status of a female is still distinguished by the use of either Miss or Mrs. Suggestions for test paper designers and examination authorities are given and implications for future research studies are drawn at the end of this paper. Copyright ©Springer New York LLC.

During 1980, many Western countries launched public administration reforms. These reform waves also blew over to many Asian countries. With the advent of globalization and the rise of knowledge-based society, education and innovation are regarded as the driving forces behind social and economic growth and development. To enhance the national capacity, education reforms have also become common agendas among nation states since the 1980s. This paper aims at critically reviewing and comparing major policies and strategies of the higher education reform adopted by the respective government in Greater China, including mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan and Singapore. The key research questions are why these countries attempted to reform their higher education and if these countries achieve the desired results and comply with good governance. In this paper, four areas, "Rule of Law," "Transparency," "Effectiveness," and "Accountability" are evaluated to examine how these selected cases' governance in higher education have been implemented in the past 30 years. Copyright ©International Dialogues on Education.

Over the past decades, the development of knowledge-based and innovation-led economy has gained the attention of higher education (HE) institutions. The Quadruple Helix Model of the relations amongst universities, industries, government and society provides a general framework for systematically investigating the dynamics of innovation amongst these agents. However, knowledge about their influence on cross-boundary cities is limited. The ways in which HE institutions bridge different innovation systems also remain unknown. This study thus examines the innovation systems of two neighbouring cities along the border, namely, Hong Kong and Shenzhen, and their multidirectional innovation cooperation. Research findings suggest that the two innovation systems differ in terms of the unequal role of the agents. The systems seem mutually complementary in terms of HE capacity and industrial composition, and cross-boundary cooperation in HE sectors currently occurs through various means. This study sheds light on the development of and cooperation between cross-border innovation systems. Copyright ©Routledge.

This article examines the experiences of transnational teachers of English in government-funded English language teaching programs, each of which recruits, trains, and administers native speakers of English: Hong Kong's Native-speaking English Teachers scheme (NET), the Japan Exchange and Teaching program (JET), the English Program in Korea (EPIK), and Teach and Learn in Korea (TaLK). It focuses on the relationship between the participation and experiences of native-English speaking teachers and the programs' different policies and institutional structures. The findings demonstrate that these different policies and institutional structures—such as the program aims, eligibility requirements, policies on salary and benefits—have significant implications for the participation of native-English speaking teachers in these programs. This research, with its focus on the experiences of these teachers, extends our understanding of their involvement in English language teaching in Asia. It urges us to locate transnationalism and the global spread of English within a much more complex field of social power relations, calling for more insightful approaches to English language teaching. Copyright ©Elsevier Ltd.

This study assesses how four types of mobility, which are analysed simultaneously, are associated with the current research output quality and visibility of academics working in the city-based higher education systems of Hong Kong and Macau. Transnational educational mobility is associated with the academics' educational path, whilst intrasectoral job mobility, intersectoral job mobility and transnational job mobility are related to their professional careers. The research output, quality and visibility of academics are based on three indicators pertaining to the publications of these academics in international, peer-reviewed and indexed journals: the number of publications, the cumulative SCImago journal rank of these publications (which measures quality from an output perspective) and the citations obtained by these publications (which measures visibility). The results show that different mobilities have different effects on research output, quality and visibility, and that often these effects can be beneficial to one indicator but concurrently detrimental to another. Nested analyses of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and non-STEM academics, and by sex, offer further insight into the associations of these mobilities with knowledge output and outcomes. Copyright ©Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.

This paper demonstrates how the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach can be useful for developing a critical sexual literacy curriculum that combines gender and sexuality education and critical language teaching. The findings from an action research study conducted with 20 tertiary students in a voluntary English class in Hong Kong show how a heightened awareness of conflicting discourses could be stimulated by the heteroglossic nature of the classroom input that included media texts, face-to-face interaction with queer individuals and in-class Boal's Image and Forum Theatres. The learners also experienced mixed emotions toward LGBTI people and reported language gain from the curriculum. A lot more would have to be done in critical sexual literacy research and practice to foster critical awareness of gender and sexuality and to challenge homo- and transphobic ideologies in everyday discourses. 摘要: 本論文探討如何應用「內容和語言整合性學習」(Content and Language Integrated Learning, 縮寫CLIL)模式, 發展一套結合性/別教育與語言學習的批判性性/別識讀課程。參與此課堂行動研究的大專學生有二十位, 課程不但使用了多媒體材料, 也包括與性小眾朋友在課堂上的互動, 和參與波瓦式的形象和論壇劇場。研究結果顯示, 這些課堂材料與活動的語言雜多性, 會令學生對性別討論中的矛盾現象加深了認識, 對LGBTI人士產生複雜的情緒, 並在語言知識上有所增長。在未來, 批判性的性別教育在研究和課堂實踐方面, 我們需要進一步了解如何培養學生對性/別議題進行批判思考, 以及在日常話語現象中挑戰恐同、恐跨的意識形態現象。Copyright ©National Taiwan Normal University. Department of English.

Special education is necessarily an integral part of universal basic education. Therefore special education has seen substantial development in the past decade in most Chinese societies, which have all accomplished remarkable degrees of universal basic education. However, developing special education, by fundamental principles, is based on the needs of the individual children. Such principles are rather foreign to Chinese education systems which assume that individuals should submit themselves to community needs, and education is the very means to realise such an assumption. Nonetheless, special education also assumes that barriers to learning caused by innate disabilities could be overcome by efforts, but this is very much also basic to the values of education in Chinese societies. This short paper purports to illustrate the interplay between special education and the traditional education values in Chinese societies. Copyright by Special Education Society of Hong Kong Limited. All Rights Reserved.

The number of Chinese children living in poverty has risen steadily in Hong Kong, China. However, little is known on the longitudinal effects of family socioeconomic status (SES) on cognitive-linguistic skills, word reading and writing in children from low-SES backgrounds. This study examines differences in cognitive-linguistic skills and word reading and writing across kindergarteners from the low- and middle-SES groups. It also investigates the direct link between SES and children's concurrent Chinese literacy skills and how cognitive-linguistic skills mediate the longitudinal associations between SES and word reading and writing. One hundred and nine children were assessed at Kindergarten K2 (Time 1) and reassessed at Kindergarten K3 (Time 2). Children were administered the measures of vocabulary knowledge, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, executive functioning, Chinese word reading, and Chinese word dictation at both time points. Results revealed that low-SES children performed less well on Chinese word reading and dictation than their middle-SES peers at both time points. Moreover, hierarchical regression and mediation analyses suggested that SES had a direct relation with Chinese word reading at Time 1 after controlling for age and cognitive-linguistic skills, and an indirect link with Chinese word dictation at Time 2 which was fully mediated by phonological awareness and vocabulary knowledge at Time 1. The results highlight that SES may exert an impact on children's early Chinese reading and writing and suggest the benefit of improving phonological awareness and vocabulary knowledge of low-SES children. Copyright ©Springer Netherlands.

Increasingly, universities have been engaging in transnational higher education (TNE), and such activity provides students with an additional study option. While much is already known about the TNE activities of universities in larger countries, such as Australia and the United Kingdom, very little is known about universities from smaller countries, such as Ireland. This article examines an Irish university with international branch campuses in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Sri Lanka. The results of a survey exploring the factors that influenced students' choice of location, institution, and program and conducted among three cohorts of students over a 2-year period are presented. The results suggest that, above all other factors, the university's international ranking and the accreditations and rankings of its Business School are particularly influential in students' decision-making process. This finding highlights a potential exposure in terms of the scale of the institution's student recruitment and revenue streams should it ever experience a decline in its rankings or international reputation. Copyright ©Sage Publications, Inc.

Teacher collaboration is generally believed to relate positively to student performance. Although many researchers have investigated the influence of teacher collaboration on student performance, much of this work is confined to Western educational contexts. This study used data from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2011 to test the influence of teacher collaboration on student performance in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. Results of multi-level models suggest that teacher collaboration is not a significant predictor of student performance in those countries. This study contributes to the literature on teacher collaboration by providing counter evidence to the relationship between teacher collaboration and student performance in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. Copyright ©Routledge.