Past Seminars

Culture can be conceptualized as a reservoir of resources and ways of thinking, acting, interacting and meaning-making. Children of migrated families tend to treasure their own ethnic cultures and traditions as well as learn and adapt to their host country’s cultures and traditions. Here language and cross cultural understanding (Ward and Kennedy, 1993; Kubota R., 2004; Wiggins B E., 2012; Gandana & Parr, 2013; Garcia, A C., 2014) play a critical role and a bridge between the immigrated communities and host communities. This study aims to explore the cross cultural understanding among the South Asian diasporic students who have grown up in Hong Kong and are studying in Hong Kong tertiary institutions.

At present, more than half of the mainstream primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong have admitted students from local ethnic minority communities, among which the four major ethnic groups are Pakistani (33.95%), Filipino (20.24%), Nepali (16.79%) and Indian (16.55%) (Education Bureau 2013). This talk will begin with a brief introduction to the social and historical background of the South and Southeast Asian communities in Hong Kong. The speaker will then discuss the linguistic background of the ethnic minority students in local schools. It is hoped that an understanding of the social and linguistic background of these students would aid policy makers and educators in planning school.

The demographics of the Hong Kong population are becoming more linguistically and ethnically diverse. As of Year 2011, the South Asian ethnic minorities represented 6.4% of the total HK population. The difficulties in mastering Chinese put such non-Chinese speaking (NCS) students at risk of marginalization. Most teachers in kindergartens had little opportunity to learn how to teach learners who are learning Chinese as a second language (L2). Facing these challenges, a 4-Tier Professional Development Model has been developed to prepare linguistically responsive teachers and to improve teachers’ efficacy in developing effective pedagogies for these learners. The implementation and effectiveness of this PD Model will be reported and discussed.

The talk will begin by examining the role homework plays in the EFL classroom. It will then go on to explore the Hong Kong government’s guidelines on homework and their emphasis on ‘Meaningful’ homework, arguing that teachers and school practices often contradict these government guidelines. The speaker will conclude by suggesting factors that could account for school and teachers’ reluctance to follow these guidelines. Implications on how to bridge the gap between policy/guidelines and practice will also be discussed. The speaker will draw on his previous small-scale research project (Moorhouse, 2015) and his experience teaching primary in Hong Kong.