Tag: Hong Kong

Dr Lao Hongling, Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Curriculum and Instruction (C&I), The Education University of Hong Kong, has co-authored a book chapter entitled ‘Dancing with Chains: How Does Assessment-as-learning Fit in China?’

Assessment-as-learning aims to provide learning opportunities to students via assessment activities, advocating the development of their long-term learning capacity, such as self-regulation and metacognition. Although students are central to the practice, teachers still play a key role, especially in younger age-groups. Teachers are expected to design, teach, monitor, provide feedback, and modify these assessment activities, so that students can maximise their learning during assessment. This casts a heavy burden of expectation on teachers. However, they may not be ready to implement the new procedures, especially in a deep-rooted examination-oriented culture such as that of mainland China. Working from teachers’ perspectives, the chapter explores whether assessment-as-learning can be accommodated by such a culture.

At first glance, the disjuncture between assessment-as-learning and an examination-oriented assessment culture seems obvious. Firstly, assessment-as-learning aims to develop students’ long-term learning capacity, whereas examination-oriented culture prioritises students’ short-term test performance. Furthermore, driven by these different purposes, the assessment tasks themselves have different goals and formats. However, if assessment-as-learning is treated primarily as a learning strategy, rather than an assessment device, the question arises whether it would be a better fit in an examination-oriented culture. The long-term learning capacities developed via assessment-as-learning could be used to enhance short-term test performance. To maximise students’ learning opportunities, the chapter looks at whether it would be possible to integrate assessment-as-learning into all assessment designs, including both formative and summative scenarios.

To answer these questions, the nature of assessment-as-learning is discussed, highlighting its position as a learning strategy instead of a competing assessment procedure. Then it briefly reviews the assessment culture in China and examines the perceived conflicts between assessment-as-learning and the examination-oriented culture, and attempts to seek alternative perspectives that might potentially alleviate such tension.

Finally, a case study provides a snapshot of the current status of assessment-as-learning in China from the teacher’s perspective. It shows how the examination-oriented culture still casts a long shadow over the conceptions and practices of assessment, by limiting their scope and format. It also studies how recent reforms provide new opportunities for the development and implementation of assessment-as-learning as universal learning strategy, integrated into all classroom assessments, as well as being used to improve short-term academic performance.

Co-authored with Dr Yan Zi, Associate Professor at C&I, the chapter features in the book Assessment as Learning: Maximising Opportunities for Student Learning and Achievement (Z. Yan & L. Yang [Eds], Routledge 2021).

To learn more about the publication, please click here.

Global flows of international students have diversified in recent years. As a result, the common association of this form of mobility with affluent members of the global middle class increasingly does not hold. About six per cent of African tertiary students undertake higher education outside their home country, a higher proportion than in any other region. About half study in Africa; China is the second-largest single host country after France, having hosted 81,562 African students in 2018.

A study by Dr Benjamin Joseph Mulvey, Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of International Education (IE), The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK), focused on the migration patterns of African international students in China. The main aim was to establish how international student migration is experienced differentially by students positioned in their home societies in unequal ways. It provided a detailed account of the pre-mobility social backgrounds, overseas experience, and post-study plans of 40 students from 14 African countries, based on data from semi-structured interviews. This enabled a focus on socially-classed differences in pre-mobility habitus, and the mutability of habitus as a consequence of an overseas sojourn. The study revealed that differences in social background in some cases led to distinct trajectories during the sojourn and in terms of post-study plans.

To understand the relationship between study abroad and habitus adjustment, the researchers examined the pre-mobility habitus of students. Students from less advantaged backgrounds tended to reflect on having faced disadvantages and succeeding. There was relatively little evidence of long-term planning for migration, because study abroad was not previously seen as a possibility. In the group of middle-class students, in contrast, studying abroad was always perceived as possible. Many had kinship networks and established study-abroad patterns among their peers.

The study found that pre-mobility habitus was an important factor shaping the trajectories of students’ overseas sojourns. International students from disadvantaged backgrounds tended to be successful academically during their time abroad, as they were able to draw on internal resources developed as a response to a lack of cultural and social capital during childhood and adolescence. These students displayed a strong sense of connection to their home communities, while shunning African students from more privileged backgrounds.

Most students, regardless of their original social background, did not perceive integration in China as possible mainly because of the large cultural gap and racialisation. A profound sense of alienation when initially navigating new social fields in China appeared in most cases to lead to withdrawal from the host society, rather than to attempts to adapt.

In terms of post-graduation plans, a consistent theme among students from disadvantaged backgrounds was giving back to their home communities. The vast majority of middle-class students and graduates, in contrast, planned to move away, some preferring to return home, and some seeking to migrate to third countries for work or further study. A common thread was anxiety around maintaining their middle-class status.

The study was conducted together with Profess Mark Mason at IE of EdUHK. It makes a theoretical contribution to international student migration literature, arguing that the nature of transformation that takes place among student migrants as a result of studying in China is shaped by the nature of mobility, both spatial and social.

To learn more about the study, please click here.

A study by The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) suggests that learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) are more likely to initiate communicating, if they are frequently engaged in Informal Digital Learning of English (IDLE).

In Applied Linguistics and Foreign Language Education, willingness to communicate in a second language (L2 WTC) is widely defined as ‘a readiness to enter into discourse at a particular time with a specific person or persons, using L2’; L2 WTC is considered the last psychological step before actual L2 speaking. With greater L2 learning opportunities in out-of-school digital contexts, young EFL learners are increasingly engaged in IDLE, or independent English activities in informal digital settings without teacher involvement or assessment. Several recent studies investigated the extent to which IDLE can play a role in EFL learners’ L2 WTC. Concurrently, the so-called ‘emotional turn’ or ‘affective turn’ has facilitated research examining the role of emotions in L2 WTC in exam-oriented Asian countries, where English learners tend to experience positive and negative emotions simultaneously throughout and beyond their K–12 formal English learning.

The study by Dr Lee Ju Seong at the Department of English Language Education, used the Korean educational system to examine the relationships between IDLE, positive and negative emotions, and L2 WTC. It specifically explores how enjoyment and anxiety influence the relationship between IDLE and L2 WTC in the exam-oriented EFL context, as well as whether gender and educational stage play any role in these relationships.

The participants included 1,265 Korean EFL learners (764 secondary and 501 tertiary students, and 400 males and 865 females) from 10 secondary schools and one university in two major Korean cities, who completed an online survey.

Using moderated mediation structural equation modelling, the findings revealed that enjoyment and anxiety in learning and speaking English partially mediated the relationship between IDLE and L2 WTC, with enjoyment being a stronger mediator than anxiety. That means practising IDLE predicted a higher level of enjoyment and a lower level of anxiety, which influenced students’ willingness to communicate in English positively.

Furthermore, the relationship between IDLE and second-language anxiety was stronger in females than in males, suggesting that IDLE may be more beneficial to women in terms of reducing English-speaking anxiety. Gender, on the other hand, did not moderate any of the paths between the two emotion factors and L2 WTC. This suggests that men and women’s emotional states influenced their L2 WTC in similar ways.

In light of the findings, the authors recommended that EFL teachers pay more attention to emotions and their impact on students’ L2 WTC by fostering a positive classroom environment to reduce anxiety, and that teachers assist individual students in designing and participating in their own IDLE activities.

The study was conducted together with Dr Xie Qin, Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies, EdUHK, and Dr Lee Kilryoung at the Department of English Education, The Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea.

To learn more about the research, please click here.