Search

In this article, we discuss an ethnographic case study of the teaching practice (practicum) experience of a student teacher, Lynn, in a university partnership school in mainland China. Drawing on Activity Theory, we conceptualise Lynn's practicum as boundary-crossing between two different activity systems: those of the school community and the university community. The impact of the tensions of the conflicting discourses between the school activity system and the university activity system on Lynn's professional identity formation is analysed. Clarke's model of teacher identity formation is further drawn upon to analyse how Lynn undertook her "teacher identity work" amidst these conflicting discourses and power relations. Based on this study, we propose that English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher preparation is more than just a pedagogical or technological task but a task deeply infused with conflicting cultural and ideological beliefs and practices. (Contains 11 notes and 1 figure.)

Examines the historical and socioeconomic context of classroom code switching in Hong Kong. Empirical analyses of actual instances of classroom code switching reveal this action to be the teachers' and students' local pragmatic response to the symbolic domination of English. The article concludes with a cost-benefit analysis of the Hong Kong educational system. (76 references) (Author/CK)

In this paper, an excerpt of teacher–student interaction in an EFL junior secondary science classroom in Hong Kong is analysed using the conversation analytic method of sequential analysis. The fine-grained analysis reveals that in the teacher's effort to engage her students in the co-construction of a scientific proof, the students' familiar everyday discourses (e.g. students' examples and experiences as expressed in their familiar language) need to be allowed to play a significant role. It also shows how translanguaging can be well-coordinated with multimodal practices (using blackboard drawings, gestures) to facilitate students' meaning-making in the inquiry-based teacher–student dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary TESOL methodologies have been characterized by compartmentalization of languages in the classroom. However, recent years have seen the beginning signs of paradigmatic change in TESOL methodologies that indicate a move toward plurilingualism. In this article, the author draws on the case of Hong Kong to illustrate how, in the past four decades, deep-rooted ideologies of linguistic purism combined with dominant TESOL knowledge claims have made it difficult to develop locally appropriate methodologies. She outlines the innovative work of some teachers who build up plurilingual pedagogies in content classrooms despite these difficulties, and on this basis proposes suggestions for future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mainland China has the largest production capacity for printed circuit board (PCB) globally, as well as the most complete supply chain. Taiwanese businesses are the main supplier in the Chinese PCB supply chain. Based on the existing investment data, this study aims to explore and forecast the areas which are worth developing for Taiwanese PCB businesses. Through the association rules to explore data, this research intends to identify the association among the PCB industrial areas in which Taiwanese businesses are invested. Data for this study are obtained from the Taiwan Economic Journal to analyze Taiwan Stock Exchange Companies and over-the-counter-listed firms on PCB investment by Taiwanese businesses in Mainland China. The main findings include that Kunshan, Suzhou, and Shenzhen are the investment focus for the upstream and mid-stream manufacturers, and the investment level in Shanghai is higher than in the other places for the downstream manufacturers. For the upstream and mid-stream manufacturers, Changshu is another area worthy of investment for firms. Changshu and Dongguan can be the choice for the midstream manufacturers. The research results can serve as a valuable reference for Taiwanese businesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper messages from viewers of the popular Korean historical TV drama — Dae Jang Geum (Da Chang Jin) — in a Hong Kong web-based discussion forum are analyzed to see how some Hong Kong viewers construct their Chinese cultural identities through discursive moves of positioning (Harrè and van Langenhove, 1999). Different subject positions are adopted by these forum discussion participants to draw, maintain, and shift the boundary between “self” and “other” in different storylines projected in their messages. In asserting their Chinese cultural identities they also seem to be engaged in discursive construction of cultural others (e.g. Japanese, Koreans). We problematize these constructions as double-edged in their possible consequences: while they seem to cultivate a sense of Chinese cultural solidarity (albeit only temporarily), they also show the danger of constructing a hegemonic Sino-centric discourse of Great China culturalism. The cultural identification patterns of these Hong Kong viewers also seem to be unstable, ambivalent and contradictory, perhaps reflecting Hong Kong people’s general sense of ambivalence and fluidity in their negotiation of cultural identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the colonial history of university education in Hong Kong, and recent changes in the governance of university education driven by global management discourses are discussed. With the systemic penetration of global economic rationalism, Hong Kong university education has gone through structural changes that include funding-linked evaluative policies and practices. Market imperatives and institutionally defined notions of research performance based mainly on English-language, overseas journal publications are exerting strong influence on the cultural practices and life styles of academics and stand to significantly change academic and intellectual culture in higher education in Hong Kong. The long-term consequences of these local interpretations and adaptations of global processes will be discussed in terms of their potential impact on academic freedom, the shaping of intellectual space, the intensification of competitive institutional research output, and the risk of privileging certain forms of knowledge production that puts aside local societal needs, indigenous knowledge and epistemologies. The views of experienced Hong Kong academics in the humanities and social sciences, as expressed in in-depth individual interviews, are also discussed. These are then interpreted with reference to Habermas' notion of different kinds of knowledge-constitutive interests (Habermas 1971) and Foucault's notion of the technology of discipline power to uncover the state's implicit transformation and shaping of the social and epistemological bases of academic and intellectual pursuits and the increasing trend of individualization of intellectual communities into isolated, individualistic, competitive knowledge workers (Foucault 1977). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze the data collected through in-depth interviews of migrant workers in Southern China about their mobile cultures. In particular, we focus on understanding the role that mobile cultures play in female workers’ negotiation of their social and romantic relations and leisure space and how these negotiations are directly or indirectly facilitated by development of informal literacies through their frequent short message service communicative practices. These will help us understand the lifestyle aspirations and life trajectories of the new young working women in China who are experiencing the most rapid socioeconomic changes in society and negotiating their ways of life amidst much tension between old and new values governing lifestyle aspirations, familial, and gender relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gendered nature of modernity in the European Enlightenment tradition has naturalized and institutionalized an essentialist, binary system of masculinity and femininity. A similarly hierarchicalized, binary system of gender role relationships also underlies the Confucianist social order in East Asian cultural traditions. Our recent study of some educated, Chinese, heterosexual men's consumption of Korean TV dramas in the late/post-industrial (but not post-capitalist) society of Hong Kong, however, shows that while the binary gender boundaries are increasingly being destabilized and crossed over in their everyday lived experiences, these boundaries are also simultaneously being nostalgically hung onto by some of the men in their pleasurable consumption of Korean dramas. The implications of their consumption practices are discussed in terms of the dilemmas faced by some Hong Kong men when they are confronted with the increasing destabilization of the gender role boundaries and how they use Korean dramas to negotiate new gender relations in modern day Hong Kong society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes to overcome the traditional essentialist and dichotomous ways of conceptualising language and language pedagogies, i.e. to go beyond linguistic purist perspectives. Analysing bilingual teaching practices in a science lesson, the paper proposes that practical bilingual pedagogies can be developed to help students in bilingual education programmes to access dominant linguistic resources and discourses by capitalising on their indigenous linguistic and cultural resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I describe the mocking and playful verbal practices of some Cantonese working-class secondary schoolboys in an English language lesson in Hong Kong. I show how these Cantonese-speaking adolescents seek to assert their indigenous identity and their ingenious Cantonese competence in an educational system that places Cantonese at the bottom of the hierarchy of languages. These self-asserting verbal practices of working- class schoolboys, while in themselves artful and playful, do not contribute to the breaking through of the reproduction and perpetuation of these schoolboys' subordinated and insulated Cantonese sociocultural world, where there is little access to the socioeconomically dominant symbolic resource of English. Without access to English, they can hardly access the middle-class bilingual identity and the socioeconomic success and social status that come with it. Paradoxically, by acting out resistance to an alienating English curriculum, they contribute to the perpetuation of their own insularity and subordination and are trapped in a cycle of disadvantage. The paper concludes with a discussion of the possible impact of the transition of Hong Kong from a British colony to a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China on language, identity, and social class in post-1997 Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I analyse pupil-teacher dialogue, in a mixture of English and Cantonese, from a segment of a Form 2 (Grade 8,13-14 yrs) English reading lesson. The lesson was videotaped 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the result of a study citing the diversity of discursive practices in a similarly constrained classrooms during English lessons in schools that are located in different socioeconomic areas in Hong Kong, China. It is observed that majority of the students in one classroom speak mostly Cantonese at home but sometimes also speak English with their Filipino domestic helpers. For students in another schoolroom, they speak only Cantonese at home and watched the news on television. The author noticed that the English fluency of students in Classroom C were limited. For Classroom D students, their socioeconomic backgrounds and their sociolinguistic and extracurricular literacy habits are the same of those in Classroom B and C.