Past Seminars

(1): This talk examines the effectiveness of “Reading to Learn, Learning to Write (R2L)” pedagogy (Rose, 2012) in teaching Chinese to Non-Chinese Speaking (NCS) students. The R2L pedagogy is a genre-based teaching method, providing explicit sufficient scaffolding for students in literacy learning. It was applied to teach students to read and write texts of different genres in secondary Chinese after school class in consecutive time periods in Hong Kong context. From the analysis of pretest and posttest as well as student interviews, this pedagogy has been proven effective in helping students increase their generic and linguistic repertoire in written Chinese composition.

(2) : The talk reviews a number of studies carried out about teaching Chinese language to ethnic minorities in Hong Kong and highlights the importance of a cultural responsive and empowering approach to it. The studies reveal emotional and practical challenges faced by schools, teachers, students and families, and their agency and methods used in overcoming the various hurdles. The studies on one hand indicated that school level curriculum innovation and teachers’ and students’ transformative experiences are crucial; yet on the other hand that the effectiveness has very much been constrained by the language education policy held fast by the authority.

In this talk I will address some recent public controversy about bilingual education in one European country: Spain. I will examine outspoken critiques by prominent intellectuals and members of the public about the educational practice of teaching school academic subjects through English as a medium of instruction. I will also briefly discuss some research which casts doubt on the outcomes of bilingual education programs, and some critiques of other research and evaluation which has highlighted possible bias and methodological shortcomings in studies which reported favourable results. I will argue that proponents of bilingual education, whether at the levels of policy, pedagogical practice or research, need to have more visibility in public debates about the goals and realistic outcomes of bilingual programs, in order to counter deep-seated myths about the effects of bilingual education on individual plurilingualism and societal multilingualism.

Many of the processes by which educational phenomena are experienced and by which the products of the learning process are enacted are essentially social. In this presentation, we report the key findings from three complementary projects:

• the optimisation of student learning when engaged in individual, pair and collaborative group work (The Social Unit of Learning Project),
• the role of teacher selective attention in facilitating teacher professional learning (The Learning from Lessons Project) and
• the identification and promotion of the professional language by which teachers in Australia and eight other countries interact with and reflect upon the events of the mathematics classroom (The International Lexicon Project).

We discuss the ways in which “the social” can shape and even constitute the learning of students and teachers, and the implications of the project findings for the optimal functioning of the classroom as a site for student and teacher learning.

Airports are organized as ‘text types’ or genres in terms of four defining moments or stages: approach, departures, airside and arrivals. In each of these stages, we witness how ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ are both static and dynamic, permanent and transient, and how they are also dialectically constituted through the deployment of various discourses, genres and styles, including multiple languages alongside images, interactions, bodies and artefacts. This paper examines how two regional airports (Seattle-Tacoma and Cardiff) use mono- and multi-lingual displays in staging their focal and peripheral spaces and how they ‘put themselves on the map’ by positioning themselves – and their passengers – as being  simultaneously connected to the global (i.e. gateways to the world) and to the local (i.e. thresholds to ‘home’). As agents of difference and markers of distinction, airports are purveyors of both national/regional pride and global capital.

This seminar introduces some of the major theoretical contributions in the study of public policy processes in the field of public administration and policy studies. Among the theories that will be discussed include bureaucratic politics, policy streams and other agenda setting models, and implementation studies. A brief survey of recent literature on public policy and governance in Hong Kong, especially arguments about policy coordination, legitimacy, and institutional compatibility, will also be made. This seminar aims to explore whether such research in public policy will have any useful implications for the conduct of research on education in general and education policy in particular.