The initiatives for educational effectiveness experienced 3 waves of movements. Each wave had its own paradigm in conceptualizing the nature of education and its effectiveness and formulating related initiatives for improvement of educational practice in the classroom. This article aims to discuss how the conceptualization and characteristics of the effective classroom are changed with the paradigm shift from the traditional site-bounded paradigm toward the new Contextualized Multiple Intelligences (CMI)-triplization paradigm. With the support of empirical data, the profiles of effective and ineffective classrooms in the 1st and 3rd waves are mapped and discussed, and some implications are drawn for research and development of a new type of classroom effectiveness.
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An outline is given of the context in which The International School Effectiveness Research Project (ISERP) was designed and it is argued that the deficiencies of existing studies and the increased internationalization of education makes the more rigorous approach of ISERP essential. A number of methodological lessons from the study are given, concerning the need for cohort studies, for observational data, for social outcomes data, for mixed methods, and for multiple indicators. The substantive lessons of the study for a strong technology of education, for a taken for granted in educational discussions within cultures, for societal support of education within cultures, and for a radical intellectual orientation are given.
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Technology per se has been seen as a catalyst for reform and change in many schools. This article reviews Hong Kong school practices and government policies and strategies and proposes that technology can act more as a lever than a catalyst for change if supported by broader changes in the education system. The article concludes that certain factors can facilitate this change.
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Studies of language issues in postcolonial Hong Kong are abundant. While the majority is concerned with the language policy and medium of instruction, there seems to be insufficient discussion on the subject matter of our English lessons, which, this paper argues, are ideology-ridden. Following the tradition of critical discourse analysis and ideological studies (see van Dijk, 2005; Luke, 1994), this study attempted to explore how a habitual form of communication, teacher talk in this case, was utilized as a vehicle for young children to "[learn] the taken-for-granted aspects of lived reality" (Hasan, 1996, p. 137), and what attributed to the creation, transmission and maintenance of this dominant culture/ideology in the society, resulting in narrowly-defined subject matter for the young children in the classrooms observed. The study started with a description of lexicosyntactic items in the teacher talk via a corpus approach, and moved to an interpretation/explanation of the linguistic texts in the light of the overall sociopolitical and cultural context in Hong Kong where the teacher talk was situated.
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In this paper, I analyse pupil-teacher dialogue, in a mixture of English and Cantonese, from a segment of a Form 2(Grade 8, 13-14yrs) English reading lesson. The lesson was video taped in a working-class school in Hong Kong, and the excerpt is taken from a larger corpus of similar lesson data videotaped in the class over three consecutive weeks. The analysis shows how these Cantonese children, with limited English, succeeded in subverting the reading lesson, which was based entirely on information extraction tasks.Instead, they negotiated their own preferred comic-style narratives by cleverly making use of the response slots of the IRF (Initiation-Response-Feedback) discourse format used in the lesson. Thus they achieved genuinely creative responses, in spite of the curriculum. The implications for teaching are discussed.
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Self-access centres are sometimes portrayed as being at the forefront of pedagogical innovation. They are also said to be technology-rich language learning environments. In practice, however, the application of technology in a self-access environment has proven to be a challenge. This article focuses on 10 self-access centres that were found to be the most intensive users of technology out of a total of 45 centres investigated worldwide. The article describes the range of technologies used by these centres and the types of administrative procedures and student learning supported. It also compares these centres with the other 35 in the study to identify how they differ in the way they make use of technology.
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