56 research outputs found
Language attitudes of the first post-colonial generation in Hong Kong secondary schools : issues in gender, medium of instruction, social class and cultural identity
Get PDFSIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DXN056484 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo
Urban governance and "walled buildings" in Hong Kong: an institutional analysis
No full textCheung, Ka Ling.Thesis M.Phil. Chinese University of Hong Kong 2014.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 318-340).Abstracts also in Chinese.Title from PDF title page (viewed on 19, December, 2016)
CUHK electronic theses & dissertations collection
No full textChan, Mee Lee.Thesis Ed.D. Chinese University of Hong Kong 2014.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 195-205).Abstracts also in Chinese.Title from PDF title page (viewed on 21, December, 2016)
Bilingual preschool education: a comparative study between Hong Kong and Shanghai
Get PDFGlobal and local factors have recently pushed English-Chinese bilingualism to the forefront of early childhood education in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Signaling new sociolinguístic alignments, each city is pursuing language policies according to its own political and economic imperatives. Using Bronfenbrenner’s (1977) ecological system's theory as a framework for analysis, this research study examines the contextual layers that shape the linguistic environments of the two cities, focusing on the macrosystem’s forces of globalization, the exosystem’s social networks, the mesosystem's institutions and human players, the microsystem's schools and homes, and the chronosystem’s biology, acknowledging all factors that affect child development. In the hope of providing better strategies and interventions for developing second language learning, it looks at the stakeholders' attitudes towards, beliefs about, and expectations of English, as well as at parental involvement in children’s English education, perceptions about NETs (native English-speaking teachers), and curriculum implementation. Quantitative and qualitative data collected (from four schools in each city and a total of 438 respondents) through questionnaires, interviews and archival documents are then triangulated to identify differences and similarities between the two cities. The results show that English is universally promoted for its economic benefits, both to individuals and society. The form of preschool bilingualism advocated by the governments of Hong Kong and Shanghai, however, is unduly influenced by political and nationalist considerations. This has lead in Shanghai to conceptualizations of bilingualism that allow only for the acquisition of English without its attendant cultural and philosophical dimensions. In Hong Kong, the government's attempt to arbitrarily reduce the size of English-medium education, has lead, due to blowback, to extremely high English literacy expectations for preschoolers, delivered through overly ambitious programmes. In both cities, attempts to safeguard the use of the mother tongue as the primary medium of Instruction stand in the way of early bilingual development through immersion or partial immersion. In addition, the stakeholders' disparate expectations about when, how and why English at preschool is important have given rise to conflicts and dilemmas that distort the two cities' cultures of learning and the extent and form of their education reforms. The recommendations made seek to create for bilingual preschool education, sufficient space, given the current political, social, and economic conditions in both cities, to allow educators to pursue it with the most effective pedagogies
An investigation into the oral English language proficiency gain of pupils taught by native English-speaking teachers in Hong Kong secondary schools
Get PDFPurpose This study examines the extent to which Native English-speaking Teachers (NETs) have an impact on the oral English language proficiency gain of pupils taught in secondary schools in Hong Kong i.e. the so-called 'NET effect'. The principal aim was to determine whether the oral proficiency gain of subjects involved in this study was greater in students taught by NET teachers than it was in students taught by local teachers. Through the examination of Time one and Time two oral assessment data, this study also sets out to investigate the nature and strength of other predictor variables for the outcome variable 'Time two oral assessment'. Through a number of different statistical modelling techniques this study also sought to establish the model that would account for or 'explain' as much variance as possible between the Time one and Time two assessment scores. Procedures A randomised, stratified sample of secondary schools that was representative of the whole population secondary students in Hong Kong who are studying English was generated. From this sample, one thousand four hundred and twenty four students from forms one, three and four were selected and an English language oral proficiency test, specifically developed for this study was administered as a pre and post test. The period of data collection was a two year period, from the beginning of the 1998-1999 academic year to the end of the 1999-2000 academic year. The oral proficiency assessment instrument was designed, and piloted by a small team of trained assessors, and a standardised procedure was established for conducting the assessments. Hong Kong NET and local teachers were trained in the procedures and use of materials and techniques required to administer the assessments in specifically dedicated language assessment workshops. The assessments were then administered by the trained group of teachers who taped all of the interviews to allow monitoring to take place and to provide a data source for a second stage interview analysis (not covered in this thesis).The resulting pre-test and post-test data was then analysed through the use of a number of statistical techniques. In the first instance, a descriptive analysis was conducted in order to satisfy the assumptions on which traditional statistical analysis is based. The data analysis then proceeded with a number of scaling processes and was finally analysed to determine whether or not any significant 'NET effect' had been detected. In addition, the analysis also considered whether any of the other variables could be considered good predictors of the final post-test score. Major Findings Analysis of data produced from the Time one and Time two oral assessments revealed a number of important findings. Students did make significant oral English language proficiency gain as measured by the specially developed instrument. This gain was significant regardless of whether the students' results were analysed by whole sample or by separate year/age group. An analysis of means revealed that on average, the mean scores of students attending EMI schools were significantly higher than those attending CMI schools indicating that the medium of instruction is potentially a strong predictor of the Time two assessment score. In the post test analysis of means, students taught by NETs performed better than those taught by 'both' [NETs and local teachers] and in general, students taught by local teachers also performed better than those taught by 'both'. There was little difference between the scores of students taught by NETs and local teachers. The banding of the schools was also found to be an important predictor variable, with the average scores of students in high band schools significantly higher than their peers in medium and low band schools. Multiple regression analysis also revealed some important findings. When the modelling was conducted on the whole sample, the medium of instruction, the school level and NET teacher were all found to be significant predictor variables although in the case of the latter, the effect was small. When modelled by separate form/age group, similar results were found with Form one and with Form three students and again the medium of instruction, the school level and NET teacher were significant predictor variables although in the case of NET teacher, the effect was again small. The findings of this thesis suggest that in terms of measuring value-added between Time one and Time two, there are indeed strong predictor variables such as medium of instruction, school level and student level. However, in trying to evaluate the contribution of NETs to students' oral English language proficiency gain over a two-year period, there is some evidence of a so-called 'NET effect' although this is rather weak, suggesting that more research is required to investigate this question more thoroughly
Tracking language attitudes in postcolonial Hong Kong: An interplay of localization, mainlandization, and internationalization
No full textCultural identity and language attitudes – into the second decade of postcolonial Hong Kong
No full textPerception of control, family and peers in adolescents' coping
No full textpublished_or_final_versionSocial WorkMasterMaster of Social Science
Reinforcement learning-based trust and reputation model for spectrum leasing in cognitive radio networks
Get PDFCognitive Radio (CR), which is the next generation
wireless communication system, enables unlicensed users or
Secondary Users (SUs) to exploit underutilized spectrum (called white spaces) owned by the licensed users or Primary Users(PUs) so that bandwidth availability improves at the SUs, which helps to improve the overall spectrum utilization. Collaboration, which has been adopted in various schemes such distributed channel sensing and channel access, is an intrinsic characteristic of CR to improve network performance. However, the requirement to collaborate has inevitably open doors to various forms of attacks by malicious SUs, and this can be addressed
using Trust and Reputation Management (TRM). Generally
speaking, TRM detects malicious SUs including honest SUs that turn malicious. To achieve a more efficient detection, we advocate the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL), which is
known to be flexible and adaptable to the changes in operating environment in order to achieve optimal network performance. Its ability to learn and re-learn throughout the duration of its existence provides intelligence to the proposed TRM model, and so the focus on RL-based TRM model in this paper. Our preliminary results show that the detection performance of RLbased TRM model has an improvement of 15% over the traditional TRM in a centralized cognitive radio network. The investigation in the paper serves as an important foundation for future work in this research field
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