This paper reports the perceptions of school principals, English panel chairpersons and English teachers of the new senior secondary curriculum (NSSC) in English Key Learning Area (KLA) in Hong Kong. Findings of recent research have reported dilemmas and challenges faced by school administrators and frontline teachers in undergoing curriculum change in areas of management of change, teachers' receptivity to and their readiness for the change and collaboration among the stakeholders. Drawing on these research findings the analysis of this paper focuses on whether such dilemmas and challenges exist in the enactment of change in the NSSC and the extent to which they are resolved. Using qualitative research procedures such as semi-focused interviews and lesson observations four key questions were addressed: the school personnel's understanding of the changes in the NSSC; the extent they feel they can implement the new curriculum; factors encouraging/constraining implementation; and the possible effects of change on schools. The findings show that though challenges exist in addressing the four areas, they demonstrate principals' and teachers' support for curriculum change.

Developing student's creativity is one of the important pedagogical issues of the curriculum reform in Hong Kong. Poetry is an art that can be expressed in simple language it can lead the child into a world of active imagination, in which the child can express his emotions and satisfaction (G. W. F. Hegel). This presentation shows how the teachers worked together to construct a series of well planned lessons to enhance the students' capability to write a simple poem. A Learning Study is premised on a conceptual framework which is based on the Theory of Variation, and builds on three types of variation: variation in students' understanding of a specific topic (V1); variation in teachers' understanding and ways of handling the object of learning' (V2); and the use of patterns of variation' as a guiding principle of pedagogical design (V3). It also reports the findings from difference sources of data including student interviews, pre- and post-tests data, classroom videos and observations. This study is taking the children's narrative poetry as teaching object in Primary 4 by using the Learning Study approach. First, the teachers and researchers analyzed the students' "poetry" and found out the difficulties faced by the students in writing poetry. During the research lesson, the teachers provided the students with the opportunity to read and appreciate different kinds of child poetry. The teachers also used the Variation Theory as a pedagogical tool to help the students master the skills of changing a simple passage to a piece of poetry. Finally, the students created their own poetry. This study showed that students of different levels of academic achievement can use their own experience to create very interesting poetry.

This paper reports the results of a pilot corpus study on English classroom teaching discourse in Chinese-medium, junior secondary schools (S1-S3) in Hong Kong with a focus on the nature of intellectual demand placed upon students in the classroom. Intellectual demand is defined in this study as thinking opportunities provided for students in the classroom, including recall and recognition, comparison, abstract reasoning, analysis etc. Intellectual demand cannot be observed directly. It is mediated through language use in teacher-student interaction in the classroom. A level of intellectual demand too far below the intellectual capacity of students in their L1 is considered a barrier to L2 development. The pilot study explored the issue of intellectual demand from a cross-lingual perspective. This perspective was taken because empirical evidence has proved that literacy skills in the L1 and L2 are strongly related, and are manifestations of a common underlying proficiency (Cummins & Schecter, 2003). Cross-lingual transfer is likely to occur in developing academic language proficiency, which is of prime concern in the study context. Cross-lingual transfer occurs between languages of the same family, and between remotely-related languages such as English and Chinese (see Geva & Wang, 2001). While there is continued need for high English proficiency personnel in the high-tech economy in Hong Kong, the transferable proficiency possessed by students in their L1 such as higher order thinking skills etc. did not seem to be taken into consideration in English curriculums or classroom practice, which was a major impetus of the study. A question, therefore, arose – can Hong Kong’s English language instruction take advantage of students’ conceptual maturity in Chinese and use it for the benefit of their second language learning? To undertake such a cross-lingual investigation, we used detailed classroom interaction data as a window to observe intellectual demand. Corpus approach

With the spread in popularity of the Primary Years Programme (PYP), the Middle Years programme (MYP) and the International Baccalaureate (IB) in education systems world – wide, teachers are having to translate the curriculum goals into meaningful syllabus plans. This paper will summarise the challenges that teachers are feeling in effectively supporting the English language and literacy work that needs to be done in delivering this new curriculum. It will draw on a recent consultancy carried out by the HKIEd into the needs of international school teachers in Hong Kong.

Many school subjects in Hong Kong now have a component of school-based assessment (SBA) to enable a better judgment of students' performance. However, how SBA could be used at classroom level is often a concern to many teachers. Using three core school subjects, namely, Chinese Language, English Language, and Maths as the context, this paper discusses how school-based assessment could be implemented successfully in the classroom.

Hong Kong teachers anecdotally refer to the setback in students' abilities over the summer holidays. Numerous studies in America reported that many students experienced learning setback when they did not engage in educational activities during the summer holidays. This project aims to apply the Rasch measurement model from data collected as part of research and development activities of the Centre for Assessment Research and Development (CARD) to develop an English reading achievement scale. The scale is derived from linked testlets, which were administered to students in eighteen primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong. These linked items will serve as the benchmark for students, and will be used to measure the growth of students in English reading achievement after periods of four months of learning, one school year of learning and the effect of the summer holidays away from school.

According to the Curriculum Guide issued by the Education Bureau in Hong Kong, English should not be taught as a formal subject and children should be EUR exposed' to it. This paper presents findings from a questionnaire survey and classroom observations on how teachers in Hong Kong preschools help children learn English. It examines the various ways teachers create a rich environment for the children to be exposed to English as a second language.

The popularity and desirability of English language education has become somewhat unbeatable in Asian countries. In this essay, highlighting the examples of Taiwan and Hong Kong, I seek to understand the multiple threads of reasoning systems that come together to constitute and sustain the desirability of English learning. In that, I conceptualize that language education is more than teaching and learning a new/foreign language. Language is intertwined with the sphere of culture. Thus, I hope to encourage an alternative perspective for rethinking the “heat” of English language education in Asian countries.In that, I seek to underscore that it is imperative to rethinking the effects of English language education.

Come August 2009, schools in Hong Kong will be rolling out a new Language Arts Elective called "Learning English Through Popular Culture" to be offered to the Senior Form. This new Popular Culture elective in the New Senior Curriculum is of analytic interest as Hong Kong is the first schooling system, at least in Asia, to take Popular Culture seriously and translate it as "curriculum-as-knowledge" in the national curriculum. While the relationship between Popular Culture and its relevance for schooling and classroom pedagogies has been explored in educational research, in the last decade or so, research conducted in this field has yielded a somewhat tentative and predictable finding often expressed as "pedagogical implications for literacy education and curriculum development" and, as isolated case studies. Yet the Hong Kong education system has taken up what appears to be a bold move to re-design its English Language Curriculum to include Popular Culture - a new curriculum that ostensibly takes into consideration students' interests in popular cultural texts to promote the learning of English. Promising as this new curriculum might be, there are however inherent pedagogical trouble spots in the spelled out curriculum. This paper critically examines and unpacks the articulation of the pedagogical knowledge of the new elective. Although the "curriculum-in-use" remains to be seen, I argue in this paper that the pedagogical investments of this new elective as defined in the curriculum, is reduced to "reading" and "writing" text types, where students are likely to be locked into a procedural way of "thinking" and "doing" popular cultural texts. I suggest how a critical pedagogical practice might be a more productive way of teaching the popular culture curriculum.