The status of English as a global language has played a significant role in contemporary language education policies across the world. In East Asia, the hegemony of English has been reflected in a number of central governments' policies of recruiting native English-speaking teachers (NESTs) to participate in English language education. This paper focuses on the NESTs recruitment policies in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan with the aim of examining how teacher professionalism is represented in these policy discourses and how this conceived teacher professionalism impacts on English teaching and learning in these countries. Through the analysis of policy texts and documents, we argue that teacher professionalism has been assigned a different agenda by the governments who subscribe to "native speaker norms" and legitimise unqualified and inexperienced NESTs in the profession of English language teaching (ELT). These anti-professionalism policies have not achieved the intended consequence of improving students' English proficiency, but have instead resulted in the unintended consequences of damaging the quality of English instruction and jeopardising the professional identity of local non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) in these countries. The results reveal an urgent need to evaluate the effectiveness of these NEST recruitment programmes.
[Copyright of English Teaching: Practice & Critique is the property of Universidad del Zulia.]

This study investigates how genre can be used as an organisational principle to interweave teaching and assessment in the L2 school context. Relying on data from interviews and lesson observations gathered from two Secondary 1 (that is, Grade 7) Hong Kong classrooms, the study sought to discover how teachers implemented genre-based teaching and assessment in traditional product- and exam-oriented writing classrooms, students' and teachers' evaluation of the approach, as well as the factors that might facilitate or restrain the genre innovation. The findings show that teachers worked collaboratively and shared a common vision in implementing genre-based teaching and assessment, making sure that they integrated teaching and assessment through a focus on genre. Although the limitations of the genre approach were noted, the innovation was generally well received by students and teachers, who felt that the innovation had enabled students to improve their writing and helped teachers enhance their practice. A few facilitative and inhibitory factors are discussed. The findings suggest that the implementation of genre-based teaching and assessment has to be considered within the ecology of teachers' work.
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This paper reports on school-university collaboration during an action research project, which aimed to build a writing pedagogy for students with Learning Disabilities in the trilingual, biliterate educational context of Hong Kong. The project was established through interpersonal relationships built from the ground up between stakeholders from a university department and a secondary school. The informal social networks were the locus of innovation and creativity within the project. This paper examines four broad dimensions of collaboration: the relationships created, the resources shared, the action taken and the pedagogy created. We discuss these dimensions of collaboration from the perspectives of the stakeholders. We found that each stakeholder aligned their motivations and expectations with other stakeholders to achieve the common goals of the research and consequently we call such alignments of interests "research networks". Finally, we suggest that "research networks" constitute an important, yet overlooked component of action research.
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This article reports on both writers' experiences as participants in a collaborative action research project in Hong Kong. The article draws a distinction between teachers as research consumers and teachers as research producers. The authors suggest that active teacher agency in research is a positive element in the professional development of English teachers. Teachers primarily become research producers through involvement in some form of action research project. Although action research is increasingly recognized as a teacher competency in Hong Kong, it is nevertheless difficult for teachers to initiate and conduct when research is not seen as a core professional activity by their school with subsequent limited support. The authors view collaboration with professional researchers as a positive way for teachers to be apprenticed into the research process. The article ends by suggesting possible strategies that would support and encourage teachers to undertake research.
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Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://edlinked.soe.waikato.ac.nz/research/journal/index.php?id=1]

Addressing the needs of students with learning difficulties in the mainstream English classroom in Hong Kong is a major challenge for a range of reasons, including a lack of research into the topic. This narrative suggests that such students are likely to be experiencing difficulty in a number of subject areas, and that a collaborative approach is an effective way of designing strategies to help them. This narrative further reports on an action research project, which has begun the task of developing strategies to meet the needs of this group of students and their teachers.
[Copyright of English Teaching: Practice & Critique is the property of Universidad del Zulia.
Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://edlinked.soe.waikato.ac.nz/research/journal/index.php?id=1]