Faculty Publications and Conference Presentations

Open educational resources (OER), with the features of openness in terms of the five ‘R’s’ (Wiley, n.d.) — retain, reuse, redistribute, revise and remix — have been promoted for more than a decade and gradually adopted in higher education institutions. For other levels of education, however, there remains a lack of OER culture, which has been identified as one major obstacle to OER adoption (Hoosen, 2012). This paper examines the use of OER in pre-school education as an area receiving little attention in the past. From a total of 61 related publications collected from Google Scholar and Scopus, and further screened, finally only three were identified as relevant case studies. The case studies were analysed following the ALMS framework — Access to editing tools; Level of expertise required to revise or remix; Meaningfully editable; and Source-file access (Hilton III, Wiley, Stein and Johnson, 2010). The results showed that the OER presented in the case studies in general can be revised and remixed easily with the source files and editing tools available. The editing of some resources requires more specific computer skills, which is a possible reason for their limited adoption in pre-school education. Based on the results, the opportunities and challenges for promoting OER in pre-school education are discussed from the perspectives of language and cultural diversity, digital literacy and the parents’ involvement.

The present study investigates how the teachers of English in Hong Kong react to Hong Kong English and how the preferences on accents of the HKTEs have potentially been a part of Washback in English pronunciation teaching in Hong Kong. By analyzing two rounds of data collected in 2016 and 2018 that consist of 180 questionnaires and 800 minutes of interviews from language teachers and students, the Washback of pronunciation teaching was revealed. The result suggested that both teachers and students are under the effect of Washback in pronunciation teaching. While both teachers and students acknowledged the common use of Hong Kong English, they both expressed that there is a standard accent, British English, for the examination, which is not explicitly stated in both the examination syllabus and any related materials. At the end, a Washback model for pronunciation teaching in Hong Kong is shown.

This mixed-method (questionnaires and interviews) study investigated the attitudes towards HKE of teachers of English at different levels of institutes in Hong Kong; the study includes both Local English Teachers (LETs) and Native English Teachers (NETs). By analyzing both qualitative data and quantitative data from 100 questionnaires and 28 individual interviews, it is shown that both NETs and LETs had a generally positive attitude towards HKE although LETs showed a "bi-polar attitude" when it comes to using HKE in class. Results also showed that NETs and LETs had different foci in pronunciation teaching and their teaching may be altered by their attitudes towards HKE. Further research should be done from teachers' perspective because teachers play an influential role in executing teaching plans; their attitudes towards language may affect their students in long term.

Students at different levels of education are often required to write analytically. At middle or high school, they may need to write (for example) an analysis of the causes of an accident. At university, they may need to write analytical essays to examine the relationship between two concepts or ideas. However, many students find writing analytically a daunting task. They tend to be more familiar with descriptive writing, having learned how to write stories for many years, and may be at a loss about what to do when they are asked to produce a familiar text type. Some weaker students may even fail the task simply because they lack the necessary writing skills. To help them solve this problem, I have developed some tasks which aim to prepare students to write an analytical report about a disaster. I have used the materials with my university classes, with positive response. I will now describe the procedure for each task and outline the rationale for the design.