Private tutoring, or shadow education, is one of the unintended outcomes of high-stakes testing worldwide. This study investigated the role of private tutoring in a context of high-stakes testing through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. This year-long in-depth study with 18 Grade-12 learners in private tutoring in Hong Kong shows that learning is skewed towards acquiring examination skills, and mainstream education can be devalued. Conceptualised with Freire’s Pedagogy of the oppressed, the findings reveal that learners are oppressed in the washback of high-stakes testing, and shadow education exploits such negative washback to run a business which reinforces contextual oppression. The findings provide implications for educational change in contexts where education systems increasingly rely on accountability and selection through high-stakes testing. Copyright © 2024 AERA.

With a focus on the neglected ‘L2 learning experience’ component in Dörnyei’s L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS), this study investigated secondary students’ L2 motivation in the context of online English private tutoring (EPT). Through narrative inquiry, students narrated their EPT experience online and reflected on it in comparison with that in the face-to-face environment. Through an initial questionnaire, in-depth interviews and follow-up conversations with 12 senior secondary students in Hong Kong, the study revealed the participants’ generally negative L2 learning experience in online EPT. This negativity stemmed from constant distractions and poor concentration, limited interaction with the tutor and peers and insufficient learning support in the online environment. These experiences disengaged and demotivated the students in the language learning process. The findings contribute to our understanding of the L2 learning experience component in L2MSS and the impact of L2 contexts on students’ L2 motivation. The study indicates that, for our participants, there are some irreplaceable elements in face-to-face tutoring (e.g. physical proximity, facial expressions), lack of which affected students’ engagement and motivation. This highlights the importance of researchers and practitioners in language education taking into account learners’ situated contexts and immediate learning environment when conducting relevant studies on L2 motivation. Copyright © 2024 Association for Language Learning.

As many students worldwide receive second language (L2) English private tutoring (EPT) that shadows school curricula, examining student perceptions of it is essential to understanding their L2 learning. From the L2 Motivational Self perspective, students' "ideal L2 self," "ought-to L2 self" and "L2 learning experience" are linked to student enjoyment of EPT. This study explores these links via analysis of survey responses of 2,216 Secondary Six (Grade 12) students who attended a company's L2 EPT lectures in Hong Kong. Most of these students (80%) enjoyed EPT. They were more likely to enjoy EPT if they perceived more financial resources in their families, attended schools taught in Chinese (students' first language), had internalized instrumental goals, liked English, were not influenced by advertisements to attend EPT, attended face-to-face tutoring (rather than video tutoring), had a specific tutor, or liked their EPT tutor more than their English teacher. This study offers theoretical implications and directions for further research in EPT and L2 motivation. Copyright © 2023 SAGE Publications.

This paper explores how parents in Hong Kong perceive the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the use of academic and non-academic private tutoring (PT) for their children, using a thematic analysis of interviews with 80 parents from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. We seek to understand the role of PT in parents' thinking about their children's learning and developmental needs in uncertain times, which foregrounds parents' temporalities in the face of disruption. We find that maintaining pre-pandemic PT levels was the most common attitude for almost half of the sample, followed by roughly similar groups of parents who increased or decreased their use of PT. Parental perceptions of the functions of PT converged on three main uses: mitigating the effects of schooling disruptions, making productive use of newfound free time and providing a sense of normality. Using a timescapes lens, we identify temporal elements in how PT factored into parents' experiences and perceptions of managing 'gained' and 'lost' time, adapting to remote learning, avoiding health risks and reflecting on inequalities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Copyright © 2023 Taylor & Francis.

Previous studies on English private tutoring (EPT) have mainly focused on students and tutors who directly engaged in it. However, as EPT is a paid service and it is usually provided outside of school, parents are also important stakeholders of EPT, but EPT research has so far focused less on them. This chapter examines Chinese parents’ agency in their children’s English learning in EPT. Fourteen parents from Hong Kong and 11 from Nanchang participated in two studies respectively. These two studies adopted similar research methods by collecting data through semi-structured interviews which, from an ecological perspective, provide further evidence of the complex nature of parents’ agency in their children’s learning. Although all the parents in the two studies supported their children to attend EPT programmes, they enacted their agency differently, depending on the affordances and constraints they perceived in the situated contexts. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Self-regulated learning (SRL), defined as a capacity for autonomy and control exhibited by individuals who direct, monitor, and regulate actions towards certain learning goals (Paris & Paris, 2001), has received much research attention over the past four decades (Panadero, 2017). Students’ SRL capacity can be developed in various settings (Kim, 2015) and this paper will report on how a group of primary school students who are from families with a low socioeconomic background have enhanced their SRL capacity through participating in an after-school tutoring program provided by university students. Key influential factors, in the design and delivery of the program, are identified. The study collected data in a youth community center in Hong Kong. The center has provided tutoring service for school students over years. The center has a need to improve their service for students who attend their after-school programmes. The intervention was designed according to Zimmerman's (2000)three phases model. Both implicit and explicit teaching of SRL strategies were incorporated. 18 university students, serving tutors received training before the beginning of the intervention. Twenty three primary school students participated in the programme, completed pre-post questionnaires on self-regulated learning capacity, and attended interviews at the end of each of eight sessions throughout the programme. As the data analysis is on going, more details about the findings will be reported in the conference, if the paper is accepted. Copyright © 2019 ECLL.

Access to private tutoring, or shadow education, significantly contributes to the increasing disparities in the attainment of language learners from different family backgrounds worldwide. In ESL/EFL contexts, many students subscribe to English private tutoring (EPT) in hopes of getting good English results in high-stakes examinations to secure a university place. This longitudinal narrative inquiry investigates the experiences of a financially disadvantaged student who managed to pay the tuition to subscribe to an EPT class in Hong Kong. Multiple sources of data collected throughout the year from six rounds of in-depth interviews with the student; three reflective essays; classroom observations and interviews with the student's tutor, schoolteacher and parent yielded thick description of the student's narrative. Informed by Norton Pierce's notion of investment, the analysis reveals how the participant invested in EPT to overcome existing educational inequalities. The tutorial class was perceived by the student as a place to expand her social network with students from prestigious schools, with a hope to ultimately gain the economic capital for escaping poverty. This study has implications regarding the effects of inequalities of educational opportunities in affluent societies. It indicates the need for further research on language learners' experiences in the shadow education context. Copyright ©Routledge.

As many students worldwide receive second language (L2) English private tutoring (EPT) that shadows school curricula, examining student perceptions of it is essential to understanding their L2 learning. From the L2 Motivational Self perspective, students’ ideal L2 self, ought-to L2 self and L2 learning experience are linked to student enjoyment of EPT. This study explores these links via analysis of survey responses of 2,216 Secondary Six (Grade 12) students who attended a company’s L2 EPT lectures in Hong Kong. Most of these students (80%) enjoyed EPT. They were more likely to enjoy EPT if they perceived more financial resources in their families, attended schools taught in Chinese (students’ first language), had internalized instrumental goals, liked English, were not influenced by advertisements to attend EPT, attended face-to-face tutoring (rather than video tutoring), had a specific tutor, or liked their EPT tutor more than their English teacher. This study offers theoretical implications and directions for further research in EPT and L2 motivation. Copyright © 2020 The Author(s).