This study investigates the acquisition of English word stress by ESL learners in Hong Kong, and assesses the efficacy of unlimited access to an online pronunciation tutoring programme. Twenty learners in foundation English language classes at the university level were recruited to participate in this study. Ten students were given an online programme as a supplement to a 30-hour English course, and were requested to practice on their home computers. Their development in spoken English was compared with a control group of ten students who did not use the online resource. The online programme My ET was evaluated according to Chapelle’s (2001) six criteria for CALL assessment. The learners were pre- and post-tested by two experienced raters of pronunciation. A questionnaire was then distributed to inquire into the pronunciation learning experiences and attitudes towards the online learning. Results indicate that the online pronunciation tutoring was fairly effective in improving the ESL learners’ ability to produce and perceive correctly different stress patterns in words, phrases, and sentences, and that students also had a positive attitude towards online pronunciation instruction and activities. The findings also reveal that practice with the programme was beneficial to those students who began the course with a strong foreign accent, but it was of limited value to students who began the course with better pronunciation.
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This study examines the problem of sexism in English language teaching materials used in Hong Kong and Australia. The study investigates the relative frequencies with which females and males are referred to or depicted in verbal and pictorial texts, the order of appearance of males and females, the depiction of their domestic, occupational and social roles, and the use of masculine generic constructions.

The present study examines how gender is represented in the visuals (or illustrations) of two English Language textbook series used in most primary schools in Hong Kong. Instead of conducting frequency counts of the occurrence of male and female characters in illustrations or the spheres of activities they engaged in as in previous textbook studies, this study involves qualitative analyses of how visualised male and female characters are represented in the selected illustrations of the analysed textbook series in terms of their hair length and clothing. The results show that human females were more often portrayed having long hair than short hair and wearing dresses than trousers in both line drawings and photographs. For the colour of clothing, although blue and pink are generally considered ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ colours respectively, less than half and only a small percentage of the human males and females were portrayed wearing blue and pink respectively. For non-human characters, again, colour is not always a reliable cue to their sex. Yet, they can be recognised as males and females by the generally accepted ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ colour and clothing items.

The study of linguistic sexism started in Western societies in the 1970s with the women's movement, which challenged patriarchal dominance in all facets of life. One of the main concerns of early language and gender research was to expose the distorted representation of the sexes in language use and in language systems. Linguistic sexism, by definition, refers to the use of language expressions in such a way that it constitutes an unbalanced portrayal of the sexes. Traditionally, masculine 'generics' such as he and the morpheme man are used to represent both sexes when the sex is unknown or unspecified, or when the sexes of the referents are mixed. Given that students are frequently required to assimilate the materials of their textbooks in detail, they have the potential to influence the development of students' gender-based attitudes at an impressionable age. The present study examines the problem of sexism in ESL materials used in Hong Kong secondary schools in terms of both gender roles and linguistic sexism. In view of the heightened awareness of the importance of gender equity in Hong Kong in recent years, we examine linguistic sexism from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. We investigate whether there has been any change in gender representation in recent textbooks and those used in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Using both quantitative and qualitative analyses, we investigate whether there is any tendency to omit females in verbal and pictorial texts. Other areas such as the order of appearance of males and females, depiction of the domestic, occupational and social roles of the two sexes, use of masculine generic constructions and naming conventions are also examined.

Gender equality has long been an issue for gender and language research from as early as the 1970s to the contemporary era in the 2010s, and gender stereotyping in textbooks is an issue in many different countries (Davis, 1995; see also Blumberg, 2007, 2008). While secondary English Language textbooks published in Hong Kong have already been investigated by Lee and Collins (2008), primary English Language textbooks have rarely been investigated (but see Au, 1992; Au, 2004). Therefore, the present study investigates gender representation in two widely-used primary English Language textbook series, Step Up and Primary Longman Express, by examining two subgenres that can be widely found in all language textbooks: reading passages and dialogues, and visuals. In other words, textual (lexis and grammar), discourse and visual representations of gender are analysed. A combination of different methods is used in this study. First, to answer the research question of how gender is represented in the reading passages in the Step Up and Primary Longman Express series in terms of lexis and grammar (Research Question A), content, linguistic and discourse analyses are conducted. Then, pragmatics and conversation analysis are used to analyse how the discourse of males and female speakers is represented in the dialogues in the two textbook series (Research Question B). Finally, to analyse the representation of gender in the visuals in the two textbook series (Research Question C), the method of visual analysis is used. To make sure that the quantitative results obtained are significant, the chi-square test is also used and log-likelihood values are calculated. The results of this study are encouraging in that males and females are represented similarly and fairly, and show in improvement over previous textbook studies in gender representation. In textual representation of gender, at the lexical level, though males were represented more often than females in terms of having a higher frequency

A central issue in the class size debate is that while cutting class size might lead to improved teaching and learning, it is also possible that it may not if teachers do not seek to exploit the advantages of a smaller class size through an alternative pedagogy. Research suggests that teachers do not change their pedagogy when moving from large classes to smaller ones. This paper focuses on pedagogical practices in large and reduced-size secondary school classes where the teacher is the same in both contexts; a research design that has not been employed in previous class size studies. The paper explores the relationships between class size and the pedagogical practices adopted by four experienced teachers in Hong Kong who are each responsible for one large and one reduced-size English language class of the same grade level. Drawing on mostly qualitative data, this study's findings show that teachers did vary their teaching from one class to another with important differences noted in teacher-student interaction patterns, classroom organisation, the establishment of classroom rules and the teacher's use of humour. At the same time, interview data reveal that teachers could not always explain or theorise their pedagogical decisions. Implications for professional practice are presented.
[Copyright of Research Papers in Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02671522.2011.653389]