School Counselling in an Asian Cultural Context focuses on the ways in which cultural setting influences the practice of school counseling, its effectiveness, and the experience of young people as they engage in counseling in schools. The mental health of young people is increasingly a cause for concern, particularly in Asia’s high-pressured league-topping education systems, and the wellbeing of students is becoming more a part of the wider remit of schools. Mark Harrison presents a broad overview of the development and current practice of school counseling in Hong Kong in both local and international schools and examines this in relation to school counseling in US and UK settings as well as the wider Asia-Pacific region. The book brings together two foci: the practice of school counseling in the Asian cultural context of Hong Kong, and the effectiveness and experience of school counseling from the perspective of young people and counselors. The diversity of schools in Hong Kong makes it a microcosm of trends and practices in school counseling globally and, as such, offers insights which will be of interest to students in training; school counselors, administrators and policy makers in the Asia-Pacific region and further afield. Copyright © 2022 Mark Harrison.

This edited book is uniquely set in the context of Chinese societies. It deals with the issues of inclusive education in a Chinese context and examines inclusion from the experience of Hong Kong schools.Like other countries, in Hong Kong, inclusive education has been promoted through Integrated Education (IE) and the Whole-School Approach (WSA). Recently, the government has introduced the induction of Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCO) in each Hong Kong school to help diverse students, especially students with special educational needs (SEN) and to develop inclusive teaching and learning practices. This book is one of the first to examine the influence of contextual and Chinese cultural factors in the field of inclusive education, in regard to how schools support students with diverse learning needs and SEN. It also offers an account of context-specific measures towards promoting inclusive education.This book will help scholars and school practitioners in Asia in particular and in the West, in general, develop a comprehensive understanding of context-specific inclusive practices in education for students with diverse learning needs. Copyright © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Ming-Tak Hue and Shahid Karim; individual chapters, the contributors.

A museum is an educational fair which facilitates individuals to explore and discover through inquiry. Museums provide participants with direct learning experience with objects and exhibits that relate to concepts and disciplinary subjects in the arts, history, science, and social science of specific time and space. Learning through museums is considered as one of the informal learning ways which is very different from formal learning in schools. This study aims to investigate Hong Kong primary school teachers’ and students’ perspectives, learning experiences and motivations in museum learning and visits. A survey study is adopted to gather the views and experiences of a sample of senior primary school students and teachers, in the local primary school context, on museum learning and visits in the past three years. Learners’ actual and preferred visits to museums as well as the types of motivations involved in visiting museums in a Chinese culture and context will be explored. The ways of interactions and various types of museum learning will also be examined, and teachers’ and students’ perspectives will also be compared. This study will provide insights into the enhancement of meaningful museum education journeys for students. Copyright © 2021 International Conference on Learning and Teaching.

Why do students plagiarise and how can we tackle the problem? An accurate understanding of reasons for student plagiarism is a crucial step to successful formulation of effective solutions to the problem. To this end, a focus group study was conducted to collect information from an “insider” view on why Hong Kong university students might engage themselves in acts of academic dishonesty. A survey questionnaire was eventually developed and then self-administered by a sample of Hong Kong university students. Based on the students’ self-report, among other forms of academic dishonesty, plagiarism is the most common type of academic misconduct. In addition, plagiarism seems to be a “gateway behaviour” that might signify a “syndrome” of other academically dishonest behaviours. Regarding reasons for student plagiarism, a majority of students participating in the focus group study attributed this to its “convenience” and to inadequate learning support from teachers. Survey data reveal that plagiaristic behaviours are better explained by interactions between personal and contextual factors. Further, students in the focus group study generally opined that the plagiarism detection software currently adopted did not yield accurate detection and could be deceived. Taken together, our data tell us that the problem of student plagiarism should be treated as a challenge to teaching and learning rather than merely an issue of discipline violation. For its solution, emphasis should be placed on education instead of punishment. Copyright © 2021 European Conference on Education.

This demo/poster will report a web-based assessment database funded by a Teaching Development Grant given to the present researcher, who designed and maintained the database and made it freely-accessible to students, teachers, teacher educators and researchers. The purpose of the database is to improve preservice teachers’ language assessment literacy and enhance their skills to design assessment instruments with sufficient quality and variety. The database stores selected language assessment tasks innovated by cohorts of postgraduate and undergraduate TESL students enrolled in the language assessment courses taught by the present researcher in a university in Hong Kong. During the demo/poster, I will present the theoretical framework underlying the design and organization of the database, how the database is integrated into the assessment literacy courses given to pre-service teachers, and an analysis of students’ reflections on their experience of using the database to learn to adapt, design and evaluate assessment tasks, as well as to validate teacher-designed language tests. At the end, I will discuss the project’s implications for language assessment literacy education of pre-service teachers and potential areas of AL research. Copyright © 2020 LTRC.

Listening strategies have been explored almost exclusively in contexts where second/foreign (L2) learners listen to audio-recordings. The limited research in understanding teacher input in the classroom is unjustified given how pervasive teacher talk is, particularly in Asian contexts. This area of research is even more scarce in the increasingly popular content and language integrated learning (CLIL) classroom, where students learn content subjects (e.g., science) through their L2. Considering its dual focus on content and L2 learning, it would be interesting to investigate whether CLIL learners may deploy some new listening strategies and how much they are drawing upon their top-down (more meaning-focused) and bottom-up (more language-focused) processing strategies. This study sets out to explore how learners deploy listening strategies to understand teacher talk in the CLIL biology classroom in Hong Kong. Data was collected through lesson observations and stimulated recall interviews with grade 11 students. Findings reveal that students deploy some novel strategies which are more relevant to the CLIL classroom (e.g., decoding subject-specific terminology by breaking down "biodiversity" to "bio" + "diversity"), and these strategies include both top-down and bottom-up ones. There are some teacher-aided strategies such as aided selective attention, which involves the teacher explicitly prompting students to attend to certain keywords. This study, therefore, highlights the interactive nature of listening to the teacher input in the CLIL classroom and the pivotal role of the teacher in achieving the dual goal of content and language learning. Pedagogical implications and professional development in CLIL are highlighted. Copyright © 2020 AsiaTEFL.