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

published_or_final_version / Real Estate and Construction / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This study is a qualitative case study which aims to investigate teachers’ conceptions of Liberal Studies teaching in a case study school after Liberal Studies became compulsory in the Senior Secondary curriculum. A list of aspects of teaching were compiled based on previous research studies and were used to identify teachers’ conceptions. Data were collected from three participating teachers with two research tools, namely, lesson observations and semi-structured interviews. The teachers came from different educational backgrounds but they taught students at the same secondary level. The findings reveal that participating teachers possess multiple conceptions and there are discrepancies between what they think Liberal Studies teaching should be and their real classroom practices. They also do not have complete understanding of what an issue-enquiry approach is. The reasons participating Liberal Studies teachers gave in response to the formation of their conceptions are found to be related to their major subject taught or major subject completed at a degree level. It is also found that when they attended Liberal Studies related training courses, they tended to use their educational background to selectively pick up teaching strategies introduced in the courses. / published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

近年來，香港有不少國際學校和直資學校開辦國際文憑課程（IB，International Baccalaureate），很多非華語學生選擇學習中文作為第二語言。然而，當中很多學生在使用詞彙上產生偏誤，而在二零零八年，香港教育局發布了《中國語文課程補充指引（非華語學生）》諮詢文件中，指出漢字的字形、聲調、語彙都是中文第二語言學習者的難點（香港課程發展議會，2008），這些難點均涉及語素。以往曾有不少研究，探討語素意識與詞彙知識習得的關係，因此，研究者期望以中文第二語言學習者作為研究對象，探討漢語語素意識與詞彙能力的關係。 本研究為量性研究，以語素意識與詞彙能力測驗和單元評估試卷來蒐集數據，並採用相關度測量研究方法分析數據，從而探討國際文憑課程中學項目學生在詞彙上的偏誤類型以及漢語語素意識與詞彙能力的關係，並提出建議以提升中文第二語言學習者的詞彙能力。本研究目的有三：（一）探究香港國際文憑課程中學項目學生在詞彙上的偏誤類型；（二）探究香港國際文憑課程中學項目學生的漢語語素意識與詞彙能力的關係；（三）歸納研究結果，並就教學和後續研究上提出具體建議，作為對外漢語教學之參考。 研究結果顯示，中文第二語言學習者的詞彙偏誤類型以「語音」為主，發展同音語素意識對於減少詞彙偏誤相當重要，此外亦需要加強發展部件規則的意識以及組字規則的概念，幫助他們掌握字形，對於減少詞彙偏誤亦有相當重要的作用。在漢語語素意識與詞彙能力的關係方面，中文第二語言學習者的語素意識對於詞彙能力有預測作用，同音語素意識對詞彙能力的預測作用大於同形語素意識的作用；而心理詞彙的語素意識、心理詞彙的數量及用詞能力三者有互相影響的關係，但仍需要進一步的研究。 International Baccalaureate (IB) Curriculum is adopted by more and more international schools and direct-subsidy schools in Hong Kong. At the same time, more and more non-Chinese speaking (NCS) students choose to study Chinese Language as a second language in IB curriculum. However, the vocabulary learning is one of the difficulties when they learn Chinese. The Education Bureau has published ‘Consultation Paper on Developing a “Supplementary Guide to the Chinese Language Curriculum for Non-Chinese Speaking Students” ’ and points out those NCS students encounter difficulties in learning Chinese graphemes, tones, vocabulary, etc. These difficulties are related to morpheme. Many researchers have conducted to study on relationship between morphological awareness and lexical knowledge. This dissertation aims to study on the relationship between morphological awareness and lexical ability of IB Middle Year Programme (MYP) students in Hong Kong. This is a quantitative research. Data collection includes two tests of the morphological awareness and lexical ability paper-pencil tests and one summative unit test of Chinese Language subject in a school. IB MYP students of two classes participated in this study and their morphological awareness and lexical ability were tested and analyzed by the statistical analysis software. The objectives of the study are: (1) Analysis on the types of lexicon errors of IB MYP students in Hong Kong; (2) Analysis on the relationship between morphological awareness and lexical ability of IB MYP students in Hong Kong; (3) Suggestions on developing of morphological awareness in learning Chinese Language as a second language. The results find that most of the lexicon errors were related to the tones and radical components of Chinese character, it is suggested to develop the homophone awareness and the orthographic awareness of Chinese character to reduce the lexicon errors. The morphological awareness of students has influence on student’s lexical ability. The homophone awareness has a closer relationship with lexical ability. The morphological awareness of the mental lexicon has an influence on the amount of mental lexicon and the ability of using lexicon. It is suggested to develop the morphological awareness of students in teaching Chinese as a second language to further study the relationship between the development of morphological awareness and mental lexicon in the future. / published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of instructional approaches to phonics and morphological awareness on literacy development of second-language learners. Of the 106 Chinese-speaking adolescents in a 6-hour English training programme, about half were taught affix and root meanings, while others were taught basic phonic rules. The focus lay on teaching students how to break words apart into meaningful parts and clusters of sounds. Chinese adolescents receiving morphological instruction performed significantly better on affixed word production and vocabulary knowledge by inferring word meanings from word parts. They seemed better able to discriminate affixed words on the basis of prefix and suffix. This study provides empirical evidence for the importance of teaching morphemes in the English-as-second-language curriculum. / published_or_final_version / Educational Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

Research suggests that the promotion of a student’s social development and connectedness can help reduce problematic behavior in schools. Connectedness, in this context, refers to an individual’s feeling of ‘belonging’ in a school as a valued and effective member. Connectedness can also apply to feelings on one’s self-image, family, and friends. The purpose of this study was to examine connectedness among Hong Kong primary school students in Years 5 and 6. The relationships among connectedness and time spent in leisure activities by students are also explored. Demographic data was collected from 421 students who responded to questionnaires concerning their time spent in leisure activities. The students also completed a Chinese version of the Hemingway Measure of Adolescent Connectedness. The subscales demonstrated satisfactory reliability and convergent validity. Findings from the study showed that in general girls are more emotionally connected to school than boys, especially to their teachers, whereas boys showed more connectedness to neighborhood. Data on boys revealed a positive correlation between connectedness to major social groups (parents, teachers and friends) and time spent on sports; but a negative correlation between connectedness to parents and teachers and time spent on computer games. Girls tended to show a more positive attitude about ‘present self’ when more time was spent on sports, but a negative connection with parents and teachers if more time was spent on computer games or extra-curricular activities. Implications for future research and implementation of guidance programmes in primary schools are discussed. / published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

This thesis is aimed at analyzing dyslexic students’ features of written texts in Hong Kong using systemic functional linguistics. Text analytic method was adopted in comparing the texts written by dyslexic students with those written by normal students based on the systems of transitivity, theme, mood and modality. The study has further developed the concept of word density within the framework of systemic functional linguistics, putting forward the proposition of using “functional word density”, i.e. transitivity density, theme density and mood density, to analyze the language features of students with dyslexia, in the hope of shedding some light on teaching writing skills to these students. Research findings indicate that dyslexic students generally display strong capabilities in presenting specific concepts while their emotional concepts, however, are relatively weak. These students’ density of lexicon regarding material, behavioral and existential processes is higher than that of normal students but their word density of psychological and relationship processes is comparatively lower. When writing descriptive essays, narrative essays and argumentative essays, dyslexic students’ lexical density of psychological process indicates less variation than normal students. This shows that students with dyslexia are generally less flexible in expressing emotions and always fail to adapt to different genres by adjusting remarkably their use of psychological words. As a matter of fact, dyslexic students tend to be insufficient in expressing emotions. When it comes to essay writing, this “low-level of emotionality” reduces their lexical density of psychological words which will in turn undermines students’ performance in descriptive essays. Nevertheless, when doing narrative or commentary writing, these students’ proven word density is somewhat higher than that of normal students. The findings may pave the way for further research on alternative approaches in teaching writing skills to the students. It is also noteworthy that dyslexic students display similar tendency to normal students in terms of theme, mood and modality density. However, these students are good at using conjunctions while weak in connectives and modal adjunct. From the perspective of education, remedial and alternative approaches may be considered for the sake of dyslexic students. It is proposed that these students, in order to compensate for their lack of emotional lexicon, may express feelings by narrating daily occurrences and teachers may support by providing them with lexicon of relevant genres to strengthen their data bank on emotional lexicon. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Education

According to the statistics of the Education Bureau, 6248 junior secondary students had been identified with special learning difficulties in 2014. The incidence rate of this group of students suffering from dyslexia is about 80%. This dissertation explores and investigates the Chinese writing difficulties of the junior secondary students with dyslexia encountered from the perspectives of teachers and students. The research consists of two studies. Study1 aims atinvestigating the language teachers’ perceptions of the difficulties of dyslexia students in Chinese writing, teachers’ strategies of helping them, and their related professional training. By using a tailor-designed survey, a profound understanding about the teaching measures applied on dyslexic students can be reached. Throughout the study, 106teachers (with 40 Primary 4-6 teachers and 66 junior secondary teachers) were invited to fill in the questionnaires. The study showed that only about 30% of the respondents were trained to teach the students with dyslexia. Other respondents gave advice to students upon their own judgments, which failed to tackle the difficulties comprehensively. The respondents also stated the writing problems of dyslexic students which include inadequate words, misuse of vocabularies, poor grammatical sentences, and problems in orthographical encoding process. Teachers could mainly use brainstorming and mind-mapping to help students solving their writing problems. Case studies were conducted in Study 2 for 3 students (Grade 7, 8, 9) with dyslexia (aged13, 14 and 15respectively), who were diagnosed by educational psychologists. This study used the framework of Process-writing to analyse the processes of dyslexia students in writing their composition. By employing the Chinese Writing Scale, “Think Aloud” protocol and interview, the stages of pre-writing, writing and reviewing of the dyslexia students were disclosed while they were composing their writing and investigated the difficulties they were confronted with. The finding showed that dyslexic students were in lack of planning strategy in their pre-writing stage. Thus, students experienced “Pause” and “Edit” processes mainly due to slow decoding of the Chinese characters. As dyslexic students rarely reviewed their products, they faced the problems of lacking cognitive strategy and serious problems in orthographical encoding process. In addition, with their poor ability to put oral language into written form, dyslexic students often missed and failed to present the ideas in full. The groundbreaking aspect of this study is that this thesis is the first to employ the process-writing model, think-aloud protocol and students interview as the framework for qualitative analysis of the Chinese writing difficulties confronted by dyslexic students in Hong Kong. Through this comprehensive framework, the new processes in the Chinese writing and their difficulties were identified which will shed light on the analysis of the difficulties of dyslexia students in future research in Chinese writing or bilingual writing. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Education