published_or_final_version / Educational Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Psychology / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Applied English Studies / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Applied English Studies / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

published_or_final_version / Applied English Studies / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

published_or_final_version / Applied English Studies / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

published_or_final_version / Applied English Studies / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

Under the background of booming demands in international school programmes provided for heritage language Chinese speakers, teaching Chinese has become a challenge in balancing between promotions of heritage understanding and incorporation of international awareness, so as to comply the aims of International Baccalaureate curriculum. The research initiates with reviewing a series of literature related to interpretation of international mindedness and cultural understanding, international education and Chinese teaching in international context. This qualitative research specifically focuses on teachers and students in an IB diploma programme affiliated to a local Hong Kong school, aiming to find out the practice and perception of the participates in and towards Chinese as a heritage language teaching and learning down to the implementation of international mindedness. Student questionnaires, interviews and observation are included into methods of data collecting. In conclusion, international mindedness is seen as a pathway rather than a goal in Chinese lessons, and one important concept in thinking. / published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

This study investigates the effects of cultural background on reading comprehension of ESL learners. Theoretically, this study emanates from schema theory. That is, the readers' comprehension is believed to be affected by background knowledge. Forty-eight ESL students, sorted into three groups (beginning, intermediate and advanced), were randomly assigned to the treatment, which was the reading of a familiar and unfamiliar, high difficulty and/or low difficulty passages. Procedures included a survey, a pre-test, passages and a post-test. The survey was used to select the two topics for the passages. The pre-test consisted of questions based on both passages. The passages were one familiar and one unfamiliar, and each type was written on two difficulty levels. The post-test was the same test given to the students as a pre-test. The dependent variable was the 20-item multiple choice test based on two passages, "The Weekend" and "Groundhog Day". Two question types were included: (1) literal, and (2) inferential. The data were analyzed using several analyses of variance, t-tests and, for post hoc testing of significance, the Scheffe was utilized. Results indicate that the reading level has an effect on the ESL students' comprehension when reading a culturally different passage. However, passage type (familiar-unfamiliar) and passage difficulty (high difficulty-low difficulty) did not have effects on ESL readers' comprehension.