Commencing study through a foreign language in senior secondary school brings huge challenges because of the cognitive-linguistic demands of academic subjects. This paper argues for the need to blend sociocultural and systemic functional linguistic (SFL) perspectives to address this enormous task. Firstly, readers' attention is drawn to the less than successful history, globally, of helping students overcome the challenges. Secondly, the paper sets out the author's intention to respond to the call by Coyle for bilingual educators working in a predominantly sociocultural paradigm to 'connect' with other paradigms. Next, aiming to respond to two exploratory questions regarding the power of SFL to inform planning of language-aware teaching, which is richer and more productive than is evident in sociocultural scholarship, the paper proceeds towards descriptive and comparative analyses of a student's written outcome in science, using the SFL framework based on 'text architecture'. The SFL analyses exemplify what might be taught, with brief mention of how SFL practitioners do so, in order to raise awareness of academic genre creation. Finally, drawing on the paper's analyses and evidence from elsewhere, arguments for the paradigmatic blending are synthesised.
[Copyright of Language Awareness is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658410903431721]

This article explores the motivation to learn German for learners already proficient in English as a second language. Discussed are parts of the findings of an empirical study investigating the motivation of 12 Chinese students to study German as a major at a university in Hong Kong. The data collected for the duration of two academic semesters through interviews and diary entries indicated that language learning was seen as a practice through which students attempted to attain a certain kind of individuality. By drawing on Foucault's concept of ethical self-formation, an alternative theoretical framework was designed to analyse the students' reason for learning German, which were investigated under the four themes characteristic of Foucault's ethical self-formation: (a) what parts of the learners' selves are concerned with learning German? (b) what ethical values and beliefs do learners attach to their learning German? (c) how do learners apply German in their daily life? and (d) what are the learners' goals for learning German? Given the significance, the learning of an additional language was ascribed to the development of the students' selves, the article recommends a pedagogy that stronger integrates aspects of self-formation into language teaching.
[Copyright of International Journal of Multilingualism is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2010.503897]

Many countries have invested heavily in facilities and teacher training for the infusion of information technology (IT) into various school subjects. The background besetting this innovation and how far learning has improved thereby are important concerns for the education sector. They are examined here with respect to Hong Kong, which is a mixed Chinese-western society now seeking to promote independent learning in all areas of the school curriculum. Geography is chosen for study because IT makes possible numerous changes and benefits to teaching and learning the subject. Among others, IT can help in testing hypotheses and solving problems of an environmental and spatial nature. Literature reviews, however, suggest that the frequency, extent and level of use are limited. This discrepancy between expectation and reality suggests that many necessary teacher and organisational conditions for implementation are not present, including the lack of appropriate hardware and software, technical support and teacher training and confidence. To address the problem, teachers need to take up constructivist approaches and the role of learning facilitators, while the curriculum authority should be more humanistic and considerate of reality in making decisions on policy.
[Copyright of International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10382046.2010.496966]

The Hong Kong government has sought to encourage environmental education (EE) in schools. However, little is known about how government and private initiatives impact at the level of the kindergarten. This article, based on a small-scale study, investigates what is happening in Hong Kong kindergartens in EE. The findings show that there have been positive changes in EE in Hong Kong kindergartens in the last decade: more hands-on environmental activities and resourcefulness of teachers in sourcing teaching materials. Teachers and parents were found to have positive attitudes. However, teachers had to tackle the following issues: the overloaded school curriculum and isolated environmental learning experience, teacher's insecurity and inadequate knowledge of EE, weakness of government support in terms of formal teacher training programmes and funding on EE.
[Copyright of Early Child Development and Care is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03004430802181361]

From September 2009 onwards, a new business curriculum which focuses on three key business disciplines, namely management, accounting and finance, has been implemented in Hong Kong senior secondary schools. A new assessment guide has been also proposed in light of the new curriculum. Such business curriculum and assessment reform move in the direction of preparing pupils to be more adaptive to the fast-changing business society; an innovative school-based pedagogical design will definitely be needed. This paper examines and analyzes the nature of the existing Hong Kong business curriculum and assessment reform from a competence-based perspective, discusses the critical issues in the areas of curriculum design, assessment practices, teaching approaches and teacher development, and suggests innovations in these areas for enhancing pupil competence development in the context of Hong Kong senior secondary education.
[Copyright of Journal of Vocational Education and Training is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13636821003605387]

The Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT) is widely used to assess the vocabulary size of second-language learners of English. The test assesses learners' knowledge of words of different frequencies within general English and of high-frequency words within academic texts. We used the VLT to measure the English vocabulary size of Chinese university students of English in Hong Kong where a large vocabulary is required for academic and professional success. Students achieved high scores for high-frequency words but scored poorly for low-frequency words. We consider the possibility that the low scores reflect a deficit of the test: words were selected on the basis of frequency counts from dated word lists of American words and at the lower frequency levels may not be representative of current Hong Kong English. We compiled a corpus of 14.7 million words of Hong Kong English. Cross-checking revealed a number of VLT words that do not occur in the corpus. We argue that these words are not required by English speakers in Hong Kong and that the lowest word frequency levels of the VLT should be revised to reflect modern Hong Kong English.
[Copyright of Language and Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500781003642478]

This paper aims at describing and explaining how drama pedagogy is appropriated in Chinese language classrooms in Hong Kong. Drawing on the theories of dialogue and appropriation of Mikhail Bakhtin, the research shows that the dialogicality of drama in Hong Kong's classrooms is conditional, and therefore deviant from the conventional as conceptualised and described in the major literature. A spectrum of the appropriation of drama pedagogy in language classrooms in Hong Kong is developed and discussed. At one end of the spectrum, there is still the domination of the teacher's monologic input of official knowledge and skills; at the other end, destabilisation of the centrality of the text and the authoritarian role of the teacher is identified suggesting alteration in the classroom communication routine, and even the opening of the drama world. This spectrum illustrates how the teachers waver between persisting with monologue and embracing dialogue, the result of which is the development of a hybrid approach to appropriate drama pedagogy.
[Copyright of Pedagogy, Culture & Society is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2010.505717]

Background: Recent government initiatives in Hong Kong have focused on raising the participation of students from South Asian backgrounds in mainstream schools, to encourage their further integration into Hong Kong's educational system and society. These students' learning in mainstream schools takes place within the context of the central curriculum and, thus, students face the challenge of learning Chinese as an additional language. Mainstream schools sometimes provide additional support, including the provision of bilingual teaching assistants to address the specific needs of the students from South Asian backgrounds.
Purpose: This exploratory study aims to investigate the roles of bilingual teaching assistants in Hong Kong.
Method: Interviews were held with two bilingual teaching assistants from the South Asian community in Hong Kong who were working in a mainstream secondary school. Teachers from the school were also interviewed. Open-ended interview questions focused on perceptions of the roles and responsibilities of bilingual teaching assistants in Chinese-language-medium classes. The data were analysed to identify any emergent patterns and themes.
Findings: The research findings indicate that the bilingual teaching assistants from the South Asian community not only took on the role of helping the learners from South Asian backgrounds in Chinese language acquisition, but also acted as cultural mediators between mainstream school culture and the culture of the South Asian community in Hong Kong.
Conclusions: This small-scale exploratory research study suggests the importance of the role of bilingual teaching assistants in promoting equal access to quality education for ethnic minorities in Hong Kong.
[Copyright of Educational Research is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131881.2010.524753]

This study was originally designed to explore the impact of a distributed approach to developing curriculum leadership among schoolteachers. Previous papers have focused on reporting evidence of teacher learning in the process of engaging teachers in various types of curriculum decision-making in an innovation project based on interview data. This article reports a discourse analysis of the interactions based on the visual data in videotaped meetings between teachers in a Chinese curriculum development team and shows that teacher participation is constrained by the leadership styles of the positional leaders in the team in the second action cycle in the project. The mediational effects of the leadership styles invite policy-makers and school management to rethink the effectiveness of school-based approaches to curriculum development in enhancing teacher learning and development.
[Copyright of Curriculum Journal is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09585176.2010.504577]

Dyslexia appears to be the most prevalent disability of students with special educational needs in many mainstream classes, affecting around 9.7% of the school population in Hong Kong. The education of these students is therefore of great concern to the community. In the present paper research into dyslexia in the Chinese language is briefly reviewed, with emphasis on the cognitive characteristics of dyslexia and its manifestations, in the hope that understanding the profiles of students with dyslexia may help to lay a solid foundation for assessment, curriculum development and intervention. Recent progress in the study of the cognitive deficits of Chinese-speaking readers with dyslexia in Hong Kong and the development of assessment and intervention framework for early identification and intervention is presented. These developments shed light on dyslexia in the Chinese language and provide grounds for further work on research and practice.
[Copyright of Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19404158.2010.495830]