Increased worldwide mobility has led to a rise in the number of interlingual parents attempting to transmit their native languages to their children. Within the related fields of heritage language acquisition and bilingualism, there is a lack of research focusing on sequential language acquisition. This exploratory longitudinal case study investigates a four-year-old girl’s sequential acquisition of French, her mother’s language, within the context of an expatriate community in Hong Kong in which English, her father’s language, was predominant. Spontaneous speech samples were collected from different learning environments and interviews were conducted to elucidate the impact of the learner’s various experiences on her L2 acquisition. Results indicated a lack of L2 confidence that was perhaps under-estimated by her parents and teachers. The change in maternal input patterns provoked a frequently angry reaction in the learner and resulted in a high proportion of code-switching in her output. Findings indicated tentative support for Muranaka-Vuletich’s (2002) suggestion that child code-switching rates may not always be influenced by the parents and that it may sometimes be the reverse. The bilingual nature of the French community in Hong Kong made it difficult to immerse the learner in truly monolingual L2 environments. However, the combination of the child’s educational and social experiences seem to have contributed to her increased L2 output by the study’s conclusion. The present study may have worrying implications for those parents unable to provide the requisite conditions for L2 acquisition at home and who do not have access to heritage language education or expensive immersion trips. / published_or_final_version / Applied English Studies / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to the roles that assessment plays in promoting learning. Formative assessment is considered to be a powerful device for improving students’ learning. However, its learning potential has been less extensively explored in contexts where summative assessment dominates, as summative assessment is considered to undermine the effective implementation of formative assessment. Abandoning summative assessment completely in real classrooms is not possible; therefore, how to implement formative assessment along with summative assessment becomes important. This study explores students’ responses to classroom English assessment in the Chinese high school context, a context typically dominated by summative assessment, in an attempt to identify features of formative assessment, and to examine whether and to what extent summative assessment can be used formatively. The study chooses to explore classroom assessment mainly from the perspectives of students, as they are a critical factor in the learning process. A qualitative approach was adopted to investigate this topic in five classes from two high schools in China. Participants were six teachers teaching five different classes and their forty-eight secondary students (aged 16-18). Data were collected from multiple sources, including classroom observations, the draw-a-picture technique and interviews. The study identified various assessments in classrooms, from informal ones integrated into the classroom teaching to formal tests. This thesis focuses on the three most prominent assessments in the two schools: oral presentations, dictation, and tests and related test follow-up. The in-depth exploration of these three methods reveals students’ affective responses to assessment and their understandings of the relationship between assessment and learning. Assessment was found to be an emotionally charged issue, and students responded to it with both negative and positive feelings. The complex roles of assessment have also been unraveled. At the informal end, students did not distinguish clearly between assessment and learning activities. At the formal end, tests were considered to be a tool to summarize students’ language learning achievement; and there was also the potential to use summative tests formatively, in particular through test follow-up. On the basis of the findings presented in the thesis, this study identifies three key related issues which form the framework of this research, namely, assessment tasks, feedback or judgment, and potential follow-up actions. This framework presents the assessment process and how assessment could be used to improve student learning. Central to this framework is students’ active engagement with assessment. The significance of this study is threefold. First, it contributes to the theoretical understanding of formative assessment, including the potential variations of classroom assessment and the potential interplay between formative and summative assessment. Second, it provides insights into students’ responses to assessment, including their affective responses, what they perceive assessments are, how and to what extent assessments contribute to their learning and factors affecting their perceptions. Finally, situated in a context dominated by high-stakes tests, this study uses empirical evidence to develop a contextual perspective of formative assessment; hence, the findings enrich our knowledge about implementing formative assessment in a context dominated by summative assessment. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

In the context of social and economic globalisation, the nature and uses of literacy have been profoundly impacted by information technologies, giving rise to an increasing variety of multimodal, digitally mediated texts, practices and relationships called new literacies. This study explores how new literacies were taken up by teachers and students in English Language (English as a Second/Foreign Language) classrooms in Hong Kong primary schools. Set within a government funded project aimed at promoting new literacies in Hong Kong schools, the study specifically explores the discursive tensions amongst the English Language curriculum and new literacies practices and pedagogies, and how students and teachers negotiated these tensions and appropriated new literacies practices as they planned and enacted a new literacies task within a curriculum unit. The research design involved a critical policy text analysis and a multi-case study within a poststructuralist discourse analytic approach illuminated by Lacanian psychoanalytic theories of fantasy and enjoyment. Extracts of key policy texts and New Literacies Project texts were selected for critical discourse analysis. The multi-case study of three new literacies curriculum units, enacted by three classes of students and their teachers in two local Hong Kong primary schools, focussed on various new literacies practices. Data collected for the multi-case study included recordings of lessons and planning meetings, participant observation with field notes, observations of material and virtual contexts such as computer labs and online sites, students’ classroom work and digital products, and teacher and student interviews. In the process of mapping the discursive constructions, tensions and contradictions of new literacies across policy texts and classroom enactments, three ‘economies’ emerged in the findings. Tensions between the knowledge economy of globalised educational and curriculum policies emphasising language forms and linguistic skills, and the attention economy of new literacies involving students’ creative multimodal production and consumption and the accumulation of attention in online interactions, were negotiated by students, teachers and the Project researcher (myself) in the three school cases. A key, if unanticipated finding, however, was the emergence of an economy of enjoyment, involving the transgression of classroom social norms and the subversion of symbolic authority in students’ digital products and online interactions. Enjoyment was also found in the ways some students were captivated by online interactions and the pursuit of celebrity identities, and in teachers’ intense commitments to and anxieties around particular discourses and subjectivities. The study concludes with a discussion of the significance of psychoanalytic notions of enjoyment in new literacies in curriculum policy and practice, and suggests implications for research and practice of new literacies in the context of globalised educational policies. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This study investigates whether principles of learner autonomy are integrated into ELT textbooks used in Hong Kong primary schools. Primary quantitative data were generated through an analysis of textbooks, and the supporting qualitative data came from interviews with teachers and lesson observations. Two sets with a total of twelve English language textbooks published for Primary Four, Primary Five and Primary Six students by Oxford University Press (China) Ltd. and Pearson Hong Kong were evaluated. Five teachers participated in the interviews while lesson observations were conducted with three of them. The results show that principles of learner autonomy are included in the textbooks to some extent. Out of the five key principles of learner autonomy, only self-assessment is achieved fully. The other key principles are partly achieved (i.e. self-selecting learning strategies, self-selecting materials and classroom activities) or not achieved (i.e. self-setting goals and self-reflection). There is currently not enough attention given in these primary ELT textbooks to promoting learner autonomy. In addition, it is found that there is no great difference in the degree of learner autonomy promoted across educational levels. The findings also suggest that different authors have different levels of awareness of promoting learner autonomy. This study concludes that a set of guidelines about the incorporation of principles relating to learner autonomy would facilitate authors and publishers in designing textbooks. / published_or_final_version / Applied English Studies / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

With the implementation of the new three-year senior secondary curriculum in September 2009 which stipulated that Language Arts would become a compulsory component in the English curriculum, literature plays a more prominent role in the teaching of English in Hong Kong. The incorporation of literature into language education, as Carter and Long (1991) illustrate, enhances the linguistic competence and enriches the cultural knowledge as well as stimulates the personal growth of learners. 　　Among various literary genres, the use of poetry is worth researching into given that students in Hong Kong tend to have reservations about using it as a tool to learn English despite its value. Poetry, as Tomlinson (1986) argues, is able to strengthen the skills of learners to infer and interpret from the linguistic and situational contexts of texts. Its value also lies in the fact that learners of different abilities can make use of poems in different ways. Therefore, there is a pressing need to investigate how the use of poems in English classes can be enhanced. 　　English translations of popular Chinese poems were used alongside classic poems from the West in this study to see whether the cultural familiarity and linguistic support embodied in translated poems could enhance the use of poems among students and teachers. This study found that while most students remained negative to learning English through poems, the use of translated poems was positively received among the high achievers and teachers. Based on the findings, some suggestions were derived to help schools incorporate poems into the English curriculum. / published_or_final_version / Applied English Studies / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

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