Amy B. M. Tsui

Do Secondary L2 Writers Benefit from Peer Comments

The bulk of the studies conducted on the effectiveness of teacher comments and peer comments have been done with tertiary L2 learners, and conflicting findings have been obtained. While some found that peer comments were viewed with skepticism and induced little revision, others found that they did help learners to identify and raise awareness of their strengths and weaknesses in writing. This article reports on a study of the roles of teacher and peer comments in revisions in writing among secondary L2 learners in Hong Kong. Both quantitative and qualitative data were obtained and triangulated. The findings show that some learners incorporated high percentages of both teacher and peer comments, some incorporated higher percentages of teacher comments than peer comments, and others incorporated very low percentages of peer comments. While all learners favored teacher comments and saw the teacher as a figure of authority that guaranteed quality, only those who incorporated very low percentages of peer comments dismissed them as not useful. From the interviews with the learners, four roles of peer comments that contributed positively to the writing process were identified. Peer comments enhance a sense of audience, raise learners’ awareness of their own strengths and weaknesses, encourage collaborative learning, and foster the ownership of text. This suggests that even for L2 learners who are less mature L2 writers, peer comments do play an important part. The implications of the findings of this study for the writing teacher are also discussed.

Medium of instruction policies : which agenda? whose agenda?

Contents: Preface. A.B.M. Tsui, J.W. Tollefson, The Centrality of Medium-of-Instruction Policy in Sociopolitical Processes. Part I: Minority Languages in English-Dominant States. S. May, Maori-Medium Education in Aotearoa/New Zealand. D.V. Jones, M. Martin-Jones, Bilingual Education and Language Revitalization in Wales: Past Achievements and Current Issues. T.L. McCarty, Dangerous Difference: A Critical-Historical Analysis of Language Education Policies in the United States. Part II: Language in Post-Colonial States. A.B.M. Tsui, Medium of Instruction in Hong Kong: One Country, Two Systems, Whose Language? A. Pakir, Medium-of-Instruction Policy in Singapore. S.K. Gill, Medium-of-Instruction Policy in Higher Education in Malaysia: Nationalism Versus Internationalization. I. Nical, J.J. Smolicz, M.J. Secombe, Rural Students and the Philippine Bilingual Education Program on the Island of Leyte. E. Annamalai, Medium of Power: The Question of English in Education in India. H. Alidou, Medium of Instruction in Post-Colonial Africa. Part III: Managing and Exploiting Language Conflict. V. Webb, Language Policy in Post-Apartheid South Africa. K.A. King, C. Benson, Indigenous Language Education in Bolivia and Ecuador: Contexts, Changes, and Challenges. J.W. Tollefson, Medium of Instruction in Slovenia: European Integration and Ethnolinguistic Nationalism. J.W. Tollefson, A.B.M. Tsui, Contexts of Medium-of-Instruction Policy.

Distinctive qualities of expert teachers

This paper attempts to identify the distinctive qualities of successful veteran teachers, referred to as “expert teachers”, which separates them not only from novice teachers but more importantly from experienced non‐expert teachers. Based on earlier case studies, this paper maintains that the critical differences between expert and non‐expert teachers are manifested in three dimensions: their ability to integrate aspects of teacher knowledge in relation to the teaching act; their response to their contexts of work, and their ability to engage in reflection and conscious deliberation. The paper further addresses the question of why some teachers become experts while others remain experienced non‐experts by examining the developmental processes of the experienced teachers in the case studies. The findings suggest that engagement in exploration and experimentation in teaching and learning, in problematizing the unproblematic, and in tasks which challenge teachers to extend their competence are crucial to the development of expertise. The implications for teacher development are discussed.

The discourse and attitudes of English language teachers in Hong Kong

This paper suggests that Hong Kong English, insofar as it varies from Standard English, has not achieved wide acceptance in the community. The paper approaches this by investigating the attitudes of Hong Kongs English language teachers. Over a thousand messages on language issues to a computer network for English teachers were analysed, in terms of their discourse and the sources of authority the teachers referred to in support of their views on correctness or acceptability. 1 The sources regarded as most authoritative were dictionaries and grammar or usage books from native speaking countries such as Britain. Hong Kong sources such as textbooks and the media were treated with more caution, and sometimes criticised. The model of English the teachers adopted was clearly exonormative. The term Hong Kong English did not occur anywhere in the 1,234 messages, and no deviations from a native speaker norm were referred to favourably. The paper concludes that these attitudes, similar to those in the business community, will constrain the use of Hong Kong English for formal communication.

Expertise in Teaching: Perspectives and Issues

Studies of expertise in teaching, similar to the studies of expertise in other domains, have been motivated by an intrinsic interest in gaining a better understanding of the special forms of knowledge held by teachers and the cognitive processes in which they were engaged when making pedagogical decisions. They have also been motivated by the need to establish the professional status of teachers by demonstrating to the general public, who tend to undervalue the work of teachers, that like experts in other professions who are held with high regard, such as surgeons, physicists, and computer scientists, experts in the teaching profession possess skills and knowledge which are no less complex and sophisticated (Berliner, 1992).

Which Agenda? Medium of Instruction Policy in Post-1997 Hong Kong

The mandatory use of mother tongue education in Hong Kong after 1997 met strong objections from the local community. While the government put forward a comprehensive educational agenda to justify the implementation of the policy, this paper raises the question of whether the change in language policy was mainly driven by an educational agenda, or whether there were other underlying agendas. To address the question, the history of the medium of instruction in Hong Kong is reviewed, and the experience of three decolonised Asian countries, Malaysia, Singapore and India, is discussed. The paper suggests that the political agenda has always played an important role in language policy formulation and implementation. In view of the important role that language plays in nation building and social reconstruction, it is inevitable that Chinese medium instruction will become more and more important. How the government will balance the need to strengthen the national identity of Hong Kong people and the need to maint...

An Analysis of Conference Interactions on "TeleNex"--A Computer Network for ESL Teachers

Abstract“TeleNex” is a computer network set up to enhance the professional development of inservice English teachers in Hong Kong by allowing them to access and share curriculum materials and to communicate with teacher educators at The University of Hong Kong and fellow teachers in other schools. This paper reports a study on the characteristics of the interactions in the public conferences on “TeleNex” during its first 16 months of full operation and the possible factors contributing to these characteristics. In order to analyze the various aspects of conference interactions, including teacher participation, initiation and response, response patterns and message types, a framework of message analysis was developed, drawing on concepts in conversational and discourse analysis. To investigate the possible contributing factors, a questionnaire was designed and administered to all users at the end of the 16-month period. The interaction analysis results and the questionnaire results confirmed the findings in previous studies carried out by the authors that social and psychological factors were very important in shaping the network interactions.

In Search of a Third Space: Teacher Development in Mainland China

The system and structure of teacher education in Mainland China (hereafter referred to as China) were modeled on those of the former Soviet Union. The Soviet system was based on the commune model with an emphasis on collective effort in enhancing school-based teachers’ professional development (Yang & Wu, 1999). The Soviet model was adopted by China in the early 1950s to deal with the large number of untrained teachers who had been recruited to teach in schools due to a serious shortage of teachers (Xie, 2001). Teaching and Research Groups were set up in schools with two major tasks: to learn how to conduct a good lesson and to learn the educational theory expounded by Ivan Andreyevich Kairov, the then Deputy Minister of Education of the former Soviet Union. Every teacher was required to teach a good lesson and to demonstrate an understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of good instruction. This then became the patterned practice of the teaching profession in China.

Beyond the Adjacency Pair.

This article examines the descriptive power of the adjacency pair as a basic unit of conversational organization. It applies the notion to the analysis of conversational data and points out that there are utterances which are important contributions to the conversation and yet for which the notion fails to account. They are utterances which are not the component parts of an adjacency pair and yet form a bounded unit with it. This raises the question of which is more adequate as a basic unit of conversational organization: a three-part exchange or an adjacency pair? This article proposes that it is the former, based on the observation that the third part of an exchange is a very important element of conversational interaction, and that when it does not occur, it is often withheld for social or strategic reasons. The article argues for the nontrivial absence of the third part by showing its relevance of occurrence (Sacks 1972:342). An investigation is made of its functions by examining where, when, and why it does not occur, and where, when, and why it does occur in conversation. The discussion is exemplified by face-to-face and telephone conversation data. (Sociolinguistics, ethnomethodology, discourse analysis, pragmatics)

Sequencing rules and coherence in discourse

Abstract This paper examines sequencing rules governing conversational organization. First, it argues against Levinsons (1983) position that it is impossible to formulate sequencing rules such as the one governing an adjacency pair which states the expectation of a certain speech act following the occurrence of a given speech act. Levinson (1983) argues that question can happily be followed by a range of speech acts other than answer . The present paper points out that while it is true that a question is not necessarily followed by an answer , it does not follow that the rule does not apply: it states what is expected to occur, not what actually occurs (see Berry 1982). I argue for the descriptive power of the sequencing rules governing an adjacency pair by demonstrating how they provide a basis for the interpretation of sequences which deviate from the adjacency pair sequence, and how they are deliberately violated to give rise to conversational implicature. Second, the paper points out that not only is there a rule governing what is expected to occur, but there is also a rule governing what is allowed to occur if the discourse is to be coherent. The rule governing coherent sequences is labelled the Coherence Rule, which states that in order for an utterance to form a coherent sequence with the preceding utterance, it must either fulfill the illocutionary intention of the latter, or address its pragmatic presuppositions. I argue for the existence of this rule by demonstrating that firstly a violation of this rule results in incoherent discourse which is noticed and attended to by interlocutors, and that secondly, a violation of this rule can usually be accounted for.