The New Senior Secondary (NSS) curriculum has been implemented in Hong Kong since September, 2009. One major objective of this initiative is to help students acquire critical thinking, information technology and life-long learning skills through the Independent Enquiry Learning (IEL) approach. Geographical Information System (GIS) and Satellite Remote Sensing (RS) can be very effective tools for multiple subjects in the NSS curriculum, particularly in Geography and Liberal Studies. However, there exists a huge technical barrier for teachers to apply the technologies in the ordinary classrooms. Hence, this project, funded by the Quality Education Fund of the Hong Kong SAR Government, aims to support the teachers of Hong Kong using GIS and satellite remote sensing in their classrooms. The implementation approach is designed totally from a practitioner's perspective; hence, the fundamental brief of this project is to develop useful resources for teachers and the products shall be; 1.) Teachers and Students - Friendly; 2.) Encourage students to practice critical thinking and spatial thinking skills; 3.) Encourage students to apply knowledge / experience acquired through the learning activities to the other field of interests; 4.) Lowering the barrier of transforming teachers’ / students’ creativity to practical GIS / Remote Sensing projects and learning activities. Products of this project include a comprehensive resources pool of GIS Data and Remote Sensing Images; a teacher-friendly GIS and satellite image processing software; teachers’ training workshops and mostly important, school-based supports. This paper will highlight the first batch of achievements and products, evaluations, successful cases of classroom implementation as well as the feedback from the frontline teachers.
[Copyright © 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Yasushi Asami.]

A comparison of the practices of native and non-native teachers of English-as-a-second-language writing in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, and Singapore based on a Questionnaire and follow-up interviews revealed a gap between teachers' ideal and actual practice, similar perceptions of the constraints preventing them from teaching according to their Preferred practice, and a general lack of training in process writing. Many of the teachers took a middle-of-the-road approach combining product and process teaching philosophies, with a somewhat more traditional approach taken by non-native speakers of English and those teaching in Asian countries. Those teaching in Australia were the most process-oriented in theory and practice, those teaching in Japan were the most product-oriented in theory and practice, while those teaching in the other countries of the survey showed a greater difference between theory and practice and more variation across individual teachers. The results can be interpreted to mean that the community of explanation (theory or ideal for practice) and the community of practice (actual practices) among teachers of English composition are not always well-aligned. While the rhetoric of process writing is generally the basis of the teachers' ideal or teaching philosophy, this rhetoric may mask a shallow commitment to the practices of process writing, and teachers may undermine the basis of process writing in attempting to selectively implement its tenets or to blend process and product elements in their teaching of writing. On the other hand, it may be that teachers of English in the Asia-Pacific region are developing a compromise teaching approach that combines process and product elements in a new synthesis.
[Copyright © 1997 Sage Publications.]

Despite a long history of publicly-funded English immersion education, late immersion in Hong Kong is not achieving the dual goals of content and second language learning at levels that an immersion curriculum can expect. The growing importance of English in the Asia Pacific region places an urgent demand on Hong Kong, and indeed its neighbouring cities and countries, to improve language-in-education policies and practices. To support the improvement of an aspect of practice within the late immersion curriculum, this paper offers a pedagogical framework for integrating content and second language teaching and learning to guide late immersion pedagogy. The proposed framework draws on three main sources of knowledge: first, the concepts of knowledge structures, text structures and language objectives; second, some of the teaching and learning problems observed in late immersion classrooms in Hong Kong; third, extensive experience of working with teachers who have attended an in-service immersion teacher education programme.
[Copyright © 2008 The Asian Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language.]

The Research Centre for Language Education and Acquisition in Multilingual Societies (RCLEAMS) is one of four Institute-level Research Centres at the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd). The principal aim of RCLEAMS is to study multilingual acquisition, language contact and the respective roles of different languages of education in contexts where the languages are not cognate (and where the scripts are often different), in order to be able to better understand the processes and issues involved and to inform governments and language policy-makers. Our particular focus is on Asian languages, including, of course, Chinese, and English. Further details about RCLEAMS, including our specific objectives and international partners, can be found at the website (www.ied.edu.hk/rcleams/). While RCLEAMS itself is relatively small, with only four full-time researchers, we conduct collaborative research with colleagues from the Institute itself, other universities in Hong Kong and with a number of international partners. There are also some thirty doctoral students in the field of language education who work closely with the Centre. We invite anyone who might be interested in working collaboratively with us to get in touch. This report will summarise current and recently completed research projects.
[Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011.]

Background: Mosston’s “spectrum of teaching styles” which composes of 11 pedagogical approaches in physical education (PE), has been popularly promoted for maximizing students’ learning in the Western countries. However, very few of them have been put into practice and studied in Hong Kong. This article concerned a report of a pilot study on one of the teaching styles, reciprocal teaching. Aims: The study aimed to examine students’ and teacher’s experiences when engaging in learning and teaching in reciprocal teaching. Sample: 3 classes of 80 male students (Form 3 : 31 students, Form 2 : 26 & Form 1 : 23)from a local secondary school and their PE teacher were invited to participate in the study. Methods: Attached to the action research perspective, 3 teaching units of gymnastics, swimming and handball were conducted in the form of reciprocal teaching. Data composed of students’ reflective journals and interviewas well as teacher’s self review were collected at the end of the teaching units. Findings: both the teacher and students experienced reciprocal teaching positively. Students perceived their learning as active and comfortable. They were satisfied with their mastery of skills, taking peer tutoring roles, engaging in observing, taking care of others and seeing their partner’s improvement. They also encountered with those dissatisfying experiences of boring, simple and repetitive learning content, difficult skills and the undesirable learning attitude of some of the students that they feared of ending up with discipline problems and learning nothing. Their articulation with their improvement in collaboration, communication and presentation skills, building up confidence, team spirit and learning attitude of trying hard was found. Conclusion: The reciprocal teaching might solve some of the current PE problems of passive learning, little collaboration and weak accountability of learning as well as empowering students in their learning. Students’ worries concerning reciprocal

This study aims to examine the design of approaches for inquiry learning with multimedia resources in primary classrooms. The study describes the development of a multimedia learning unit that helps learners understand the natural phenomenon of the movement of the Earth. An analysis of the use of the multimedia learning unit by a teacher in two classes of pupils aged 10-12, with different pedagogical approaches, was reported. The multimedia learning unit was used by the teacher in the first class with her own understanding of inquiry learning, which is a teacher-oriented approach with mainly teacher control of the learning. She shifted to a more learneroriented approach of inquiry with another class after receiving suggestions from the lesson observers. A comparison of the prelesson and postlesson tests was conducted to study the learning achievement of the two classes of learners using the same multimedia unit. The results showed that though there were significant improvements in learning achievement in both classes, the teaching with a learner-oriented approach with less teacher controlled over the use of multimedia components resulted in learners' better achievement. The study concludes with suggestions on design of teaching based on inquiry learning with multimedia learning resources and the shift to a more learner-oriented inquiry approach.
[Copyright © 2007 Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education.]

The use of students' second language as the medium of instruction in schools is quite common in former colonies of Western countries. Schools in Hong Kong have had this kind of experience for more than 150 years. In this study, three factors, namely economic, political, and educational, are found to affect the choice of medium of instruction in schools. In particular, the economic factor is found to be the dominant one for most of the time, while the educational factor has the smallest influence. Due to the change of the above three factors and their interactions over time, there were more Chinese-medium secondaryschools in the first 100 years (1842-1949) and then more English-medium secondaryschools during the transitional period 1950-97. However, the political factor suddenlybecomes dominant after the change of sovereignty- there is an abrupt drop in English-medium secondaryschools after government intervention in 1998. Educators should be more vocal and involved in politics in order to push the Government to make decisions that are educationally right.
[Copyright © 2004 Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business.]

This paper presents a teaching/learning model that utilizes information technology to facilitate critical thinking and collaboration skills in two physical education modules, Adapted Physical Education (28 students), and Motor Learning (27 students), taught at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. The aim of the project was to examine whether three types of asynchronous online activities embedded within the Blackboard Learning Management System enhanced student learning. The effectiveness of these activities was assessed through the number of online interactions, a survey, and selected interviews. Results showed greater online interactions than face-to-face interactions (ranging from 37 to 132 interactions per topic), improved ability to integrate theory with practical settings, and high level of student satisfaction with the online mode of delivery. The study indicated that the creation of alternative learning spaces in the Blackboard Learning Management System is an effective platform to enhance learning through interactive student-centered learning activities beyond the physical education classroom.
[Copyright © 2008 ACESS, Asian Council of Exercise & Sports Science.]

Ubiquitous devices offer new teaching and learning opportunities from K-12 to higher education settings. The integration of mobile facilities and Web technologies allows researchers and educators to explore different possibilities in m-Learning. In this study, a group of pre-service IT teachers in Hong Kong were introduced to the field of m-Learning by participating in a series of m-Learning activities. Three applications were designed and programmed with XTHML-MP/WAP 2.0 technologies and supported by server-side Web technologies of PHP and MySQL. The research aimed at providing the opportunities for the teachers to explore this new trend in teaching and learning and to find out their acceptance of this approach.
[Copyright © 2008 by SICET.]

Drawing on the theory of dialogism and the literature on children’s culture and cultural resistance, this article investigates the contextual and textual features of the cultural making of a group of children in sociodramatic play in a Hong Kong kindergarten. Different from other, similar studies, this study reports that under the gaze of the teacher, children’s play is largely practised as a reproduction of the teacher’s cultural texts. Children’s culture or resistance only arises as a bricolage of various cultural texts in which the cultural texts of the teacher and the children are intertwined, dissonant and hybridized. Two major modes of bricolage are identified. They are hybridization and invalidation. This result suggests that the teacher’s strategies and authoritarian discourse are suppressive of the children’s culture, aiming largely to shape the way and process of their cultural making. Nonetheless, from the evidence in this study, it is believed that bricoleur is a creative act as it involves tactful and creative appropriation, orchestration and transformation of all sorts of cultural texts which are at hand. The pretend play corner is consequently reframed and recreated as a heteroglot playing space of the children’s own.
[Copyright © The Author(s) 2012.]