Research Projects

Most research of early Chinese glass has focused on the issues of origin and considered this medium primarily as an evidence of China’s contacts with outside civilisations. This research, on the contrary, will explore the subject of glass in "Chinese form", which is generally agreed was locally manufactured. Because of the ostensive resemblance, many glass objects unearthed in Han burial sites have been confused with stone or ceramic materials, and some even have been mistaken for jade in archaeological reports. Therefore, this project will first cautiously investigate the feature descriptions and documentation of the relevant items in the reports and conduct firsthand study of the objects. A rigorous re-examination of the information will bring the glass pieces that have been disregarded and excluded in previous studies into the research. Because of its similarity to jade, glass had been generally perceived as a less precious substitute material for jade in ancient China. But judging by recently discovered glass pieces, the use of glass during the Han period, particularly in burials, was not that simple and did not necessarily follow that logic. By relying on archaeological material and reports of scientific analyses, and adopting the interdisciplinary approach of art historical stylistic analyses and contextual material studies, this research will address the importance of glass in Han burial rituals. It may illuminate the role of glass in contemporaneous perceptions of immortality, and will review the hierarchy of material in the ritual context.

At the turn of the twentieth century technologies and media of sound recording entered music classrooms and became an integral part of music learning. What then existed was often called “the teaching of singing,” classrooms where students sung along to teacher- played piano accompaniment. What emerged was “music appreciation”—as teachers used recordings to teach great works like literature, shared music from distant places, and a variety of other ways to teach about music. Building on work in the field of sound studies, the present proposal will provide an historical account of the creation and emergence of music appreciation as pedagogy built around media of sound recording from approximately 1900-1950. This study addresses the understanding of how music learning is connected to various media of sound recording in ways that impact what is taught and how it is taught, working within theoretical approaches from the field of sound studies (Pinch & Bijsterveld, 2012; Sterne, 2012a). Sound studies is a newly emerged interdisciplinary approach to the study of sound in human contexts, typically combining disciplines such as history, philosophy, and science and technology studies. In particular, this study characterizes media not only as the gadgets, but as larger mediated networks of recurring relations between people, practices, institutions, and technologies that come to be understood as a medium through recurrent patterns of usage. For instance, the actual medium of radio is a network that includes producers, artists, technicians, broadcast standards, advertisers, and so on. Because the radio medium involves these various aspects, media theorists note plasticity as the medium evolves, and especially as a medium first emerges, just as radio now includes satellite and various connections through the internet. This project is comprised a set of case studies, each of which examines the ways that various media of sound recording were incorporated into the teaching and learning of music. Following previous research, particular attention will be paid to the emergence of specific pedagogic approaches that emerged in concert with media of sound recording. The cases will combine historical data, changing pedagogic practices, along with theoretical implications to establish the recurring patterns and interactions between people, practices, institutions and technologies as wants, needs, values and practices adapted to sound recordings. Cases will include changes to textbooks, the Music Memory competitions in the USA, and the NBC Music Appreciation Hour, along with the connections to the larger network of media and technology.

In the years surrounding the second World War from the 1930s-50s, numerous new theatres opened in different districts across Hong Kong including Majestic Theatre (1928 in Jordan), Cathay Theatre (1939 in Wanchai), Capitol Theatre (1952 in Causeway Bay), etc. These buildings indicated a flourishing of entertainment businesses in Hong Kong and the high demand of this form of leisure from the local society. Interestingly, most of these theatre buildings were built in the Art Deco architectural style. Most of these theatres are now demolished or abandoned, but a socio-history of entertainment and theatre buildings in Hong Kong are missing in academia and there is a need of repositioning in the field. This research argues that Art Deco, a modern architectural style, can be understood as a form of entertainment and demonstration of resistance of the colonized in early twentieth century Hong Kong. The study also aims at demonstrating that these theatre buildings are not passive objects, but rather subjects that are able to consume the dominating culture to ‘self-fashion’ and ‘self-represent’, in using postcolonial theoretical terms. Previous research has been done on Chinese cinema operators and cinema business in Hong Kong in the early twentieth century, but little research has been conducted to link the architecture or socio-cultural landscape of Hong Kong cinema to postcolonial theories. This project will envision a three-tiered impact. First, the research will reveal the ways in which the patron, architect and the audience of the theatre buildings interacted with each other in laying the foundation of modern cinema and public entertainment history in Hong Kong. Second, based on archival research and visual ethnography, the research will adopt postcolonial theory to analyse and problematize the architectures, and investigate the ways that they ‘self-fashion’ and ‘self-represent’ different identities. Third, on top of formulating a database on Art Deco theatres, the research will propose ways of strengthening the conservation policy for the remaining few surviving Art Deco theatres in Hong Kong. The project will ultimately examine the reach of Art Deco into everyday life of Hong Kong in the form of architecture and cinema, critique the dynamics between the dominated-subjugated in colonial Hong Kong, and offer a new way to conserve architectural heritage through emphasizing its aesthetic and socio-cultural implications.

Effective learning of second language (L2) vocabulary hinges on the learners’ ability to self-regulate their learning. However, little research interest has been shown in how students self-regulate when they are left on their own to explore L2 vocabulary learning mediated by mobile technologies. In this research, a self-regulated and personalised (SRP) vocabulary learning approach is developed and its effectiveness measured. This research aims to help students develop a heightened capacity for self-regulation to learn L2 vocabulary with mobile technologies more efficiently and effectively. This research adopts a mixed-method design. An experimental design is adopted to find out to what extent students can learn L2 vocabulary using the SRP approach in a mobile technology-mediated environment via a self-directed intervention for one semester. In addition, a multi-case study will be conducted to provide qualitative evidence to verify whether the self-directed SRP approach can lead to a heightened capacity for self-regulation.

English is stress-timed while Chinese is syllable-timed, which makes English word stress placement difficult for Chinese learners of English. This project aims to develop assessment tasks to identify Chinese learners’ difficulties in English word stress placement in perception and production, design training programmes to examine whether word stress can be acquired systematically, and conduct a teaching experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of the training programmes in facilitating the learning of word stress. This project will generate substantial impact in both theory and practice.

Since the return of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to China in 1997, Cantonese opera has been included in the SAR's school music curriculum. Recently, the People’s Government of Guangdong Province (2017) issued an ordinance to promote the transmission of the traditional music genre through all channels, including school education. Cantonese opera has been officially included in the policy agenda of both Hong Kong and mainland China, to preserve it and to promote cultural education in schools. Hong Kong people have been facing a challenge of identities. The initiative to develop Moral and National Education as compulsory subjects in schools in 2012 was opposed by younger generations. This was one of the reasons for the protest event “Occupy Central”. At present in the Hong Kong community, there appears to be conflict between younger generations striving for their “Hongkongese” identity, and another group that embraces and defends their Chinese national identity. A broad-based concept of national education has been proposed, which is a comprehensive model that should include national, political, social and cultural identity. As Cantonese opera is an art form replete with Chinese cultural elements, and thus suitable for promoting Chinese cultural identity, this study aims: 1) to investigate the current state regarding teaching and learning Cantonese opera in the schools of Hong Kong and Guangzhou, 2) to examine the extent to which variables such as teachers’ musical preference and teacher education in Hong Kong and Guangzhou may contribute to the teaching of Cantonese opera in music classes; and 3) to examine the extent to which learning Cantonese opera in schools may contribute to the development of Chinese cultural identity in students. Based on the Social Identity Theory, this study is in two phases employing a sequential explanatory mixed-method design. Phase I will be a questionnaire survey to investigate the current ways in which Cantonese opera is taught in schools. A hardcopy/online questionnaire will be designed and disseminated to all primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong and Guangzhou for music teachers. Phase II is a multiple-case study in which eight schools from both cities will be involved. Researchers will observe the classes over three months in each school and interview teachers and students for feedback and reflection on students’ development of Chinese cultural identity. This study will reflect the current situation in terms of teaching and learning of the genre, which will provide insights for future development.

This project seeks to investigate how student teachers are prepared to teach CT in a pre-service language teacher education programme in Hong Kong. Adopting an ethnographic case study design and informed by an ecological perspective on teacher education, the project will explore how student teachers learn to teach CT in relation to their programme coverage, coherence and applicability. The project will also draw on multiple perspectives from language teacher educators and programme leaders/coordinators to discover how CT is integrated with their situated teacher education curricula. Such an ethnographic design not only can contribute to our understanding of CT, but can also generate insights into the dynamic, complex process of teacher learning across different sites, influenced by a range of institutional and socio-cultural factors.

This project responds to the need for research into the teaching of English to young learners (TEYL), defined as children between the ages of 5-12. Despite the significant increase in popularity of TEYL globally, including mainland China, our knowledge of how TEYL is implemented, the attitudes of teachers, and the challenges they face is scant. This project, therefore, addresses this gap in our understanding of English language teaching and learning by exploring the experiences of one group of primary school English teachers in mainland China. A particular contribution of this project is to examine the experiences and perceptions of teachers of English to young learners using the theoretical lens of teacher identity. The results of this project will be of interest to policy makers, teacher educators, school authorities, researchers, and teachers of young learners themselves, both in mainland China and analogous educational settings worldwide.

This oral history project aims to document the voices of Hong Kong leftist film workers who were active from 1949 to 1966 and to utilize their voices to reconstruct Cold War Hong Kong history. The principal investigator adopts the common usage of the term “leftist” during this era, defining leftist film workers as those who worked for the three major leftist film studios and the sole distributor of films made in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Until the mid-1960s, leftists controlled a significant share of the Hong Kong film market, produced popular movies and exported their productions and PRC-made films to other Chinese communities

This study aims to investigate the cognitive factors of word reading in CSL and native Chinese-speaking learners.

There is a gap between the traditional art education model and the needs of contemporary society. The main content of Discipline-based Art Education (DBAE), developed by art educators in the 1980s-90s, has been adopted by the Hong Kong Education Bureau since 1996. The aim of DBAE is to educate students to become an elite in high/fine arts. However, the assumptions in DBAE about art education fail to justify the use of a modernist paradigm for teaching and learning art in the postmodern era. Art educators criticize DBAE’s monotype mode of teaching for producing students who do not have the ability to think critically. Since DBAE celebrates only modern art and culture, it fails to fulfill the needs produced by the rapid changes that take place in contemporary society and in the students’ social lives. It cannot cultivate the higher order thinking or visual literacy skills that students require to appreciate and interpret artworks, and to create meaning about society and themselves. As a new model for art education, art educators claim that Visual Culture Art Education (VCAE) facilitates students’ critical thinking skills and creativity related to their daily, postmodern lives. It critically reflects the complexity of the relationships between students’ social lives, everyday life experiences and the visual images they encounter. The aim of VCAE is to nourish critical, reflective and creative thinking skills to prepare the new generation with the level of visual literacy they need for the 21st century. In the long run, VCAE can provide an educational method that nourishes students’ critical and interpretive abilities to suit the needs of Hong Kong culture. However, we do not know how effective VCAE is and teachers do not know how to use VCAE to teach. A VCAE model is necessary for knowledge transfer, but one has not yet been established. By developing such a model the proposed study will bridge the gap between theory and practice. It will also help to bridge the gaps between students’ learning, their everyday socio-cultural life and the real world. This study will adopt a design-based research methodology, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, to examine the effectiveness of VCAE and to identify its teaching and learning approaches. Data collection and evaluation methods include pre-test, post-test and delayed post-test evaluations of students’ portfolios, observations, interviews with teachers and students and document analysis. Senior high schools, teachers and their students will be involved in the study.

This project investigates literary fields of Taiwan and Hong Kong in the 1960s. In 1967, Lin Haiyin founded Chun Wenxue literary journal in Taiwan. In the same year, its Hong Kong version was published by Wang Jingxi .Wang also introduced Wen Xing Cong Kan series from Taiwan via his Wen Yi Bookstore. It was owing to Hong Kong version of Wen Xing Cong Kan that Hong Kong readers could get a glimpse of the works of Yin Haiguang, Li Ao, Bo Yang, whose once banned works were difficult to access even in Taiwan.

On the other hand, his poor management led to accusation of not paying royalties to the authors and infringements of copyrights. What Wang created from the mid-1960s to 70s was a complicated case regarding cultural publishing. This project aims to investigate the significance of Wang Jingxi in the dissemination of literature across Hong Kong and Taiwan.

The project regards “written languages” as a combined perspective from Joseph Yau and City Magazine. Through the study of this important local writer and the development of City in 1970s and 80s, it aims to examine the complicated interrelation between written languages and identities and investigate the process of local identity building. We would like to advocate the inclusiveness and open-mindedness of “localness” in Yau and City. It is true that this project places a strong focus on local literature, history and culture. As we know that international approach is very critical in success of our research, we will place Yau and City in the whole picture of international politics and western cultures which are highly influential to Hong Kong during the period concerned.

Art museums are places where students learn from original artworks. Previous scholarship on museum education has placed the emphasis either on visitors’ experiences or on outcomes of learning gained from museum visits. There is a lack of empirical research into group dialogue – the most used education strategy in museums and the most basic component of teaching in classrooms. The proposed study will investigate the group dialogues conducted by teachers with students in museums and classrooms. Three modes of dialogue proposed by Hubard (2015) – predetermined, thematic and open – will be tested with primary school teachers and students. ‘Design-based research’, a method to identify improvements systematically from experiments in learning situations, will be the methodology employed. The study will be conducted in three phases. Phase 1 will involve the preparation of teacher participants for leading group dialogues and curriculum plan development. Ten teachers and about 270 sixth-grade students (age 12) from different primary schools will be invited to participate in the study. Five workshops on effective group dialogue strategy will be conducted for the teacher participants. They will develop two five- to six-week curriculum plans with each incorporating one museum visit. Phase 2 will focus on the implementation of the plans with the support of the investigators and the evaluation of teachers’ and students’ performance in the group dialogue. Data will be obtained from the teachers’ reflections, interviews, observations and video recordings of museum visits and classroom teaching before, during and after the implementation of the plans. Phase 3 will be the data analysis stage. Taking the Hong Kong context into consideration, the results of the study will be used to create a pedagogical model that is theoretically and practically sound. The study is particularly meaningful given the increased emphasis that has been placed on learning art criticism in the new Education Bureau Visual Arts (VA) curriculums. In the revised VA curriculum for primary one to secondary three levels, it is explicitly stated that art making should be learned in connection with art criticism. The study will also be a timely response to the development of the West Kowloon Cultural District. In 2019, the Museum+ will be launched and the Hong Kong Museum of Art will be re-opened after renovation. There will be numerous opportunities for students and members of the public to visit these purpose-built museums. In this connection, an educated audience and refined museum practices are much needed.

Twenty years after its 1997 handover back to China Hong Kong remains a unique place on the world’s stage. British colonialism has left many enduring marks on Hong Kong identity as well as on its physical landscape. One of the most peculiar, and controversial, is the legacy of the Small House Policy of the New Territories; an agreement reached between the British and the village leaders after it leased the New Territories in 1898. In a city of severe land scarcity, this unusual law grants decedents of ‘original villager’s’ families (mainly Hakka people), upon their 18 birthday, rights to build a maximum three story house of no more than 2100 sqft. With skyrocketing housing prices downtown this has created a boom of these ‘village houses’ being build and sold, mainly to ‘new villagers’ migrating from the city, on lands that once were Hong Kong’s farms and rice paddies. This has led to rapid changes in the visuality of these once traditional villages. The most notable visual change among these communities is the disappearance of traditional Hakka ancestral family homes, which are now scattered throughout a maze of stylistically unrelated modern village houses. The vanishing of these unique homes continues at rapid pace and since commencement of a pilot study in the spring of 2018 at least half a dozen additional ancestral homes, some dating back over a century, have been demolished during the summer. This makes the study of these traditional homes, their visual culture, and how they once formed the backbones of these villages all the more urgent. In order to do so this visually driven study employs both audio and visual methods to seek a more in-depth picture of current village life in North Eastern New Territories, Hong Kong by observing, documenting, collaboratively creating, and jointly analysing the multimedia data captured. This study documents the derelict, intact, restored, in ruin ancestral structures, attempting to trace revitalized elements of traditional Hakka villages via their design, layouts, and relationship with the natural environment. The study looks at how the making and sharing of imagery can foster dialogue and analyse the current state of flux of these villages and their lands to reconsider the ‘place’ they occupy how these changes may affect visual cultural identity and connections with the past.

The prevalent theory traces the origins of Chinese fiction to the Wei and Jin Dynasties and considers the Tang Dynasty the time when they emerged fully fledged. With the advancement of archaeological works in China, this theory is gradually being challenged by excavated works of fiction dated to the Warring States and the Qin and Han periods. However, questions such as what are the stylistic features of early Chinese fiction and how did the fiction genre developed from that of historical writing remain to be answered. The purpose of this project is to focus on Mutienzi zhuan (The Travels of King Mu) to answer the above questions. As the earliest excavated text that survives into the modern age in Chinese history, our research on Mutienzi zhuan involves multiple aspects. We will start with a textual study of the text from a paleographical perspective, then move on to date its contents by comparing the text against documented bronze sources. The third step is to analyze the stylistic features of Mutienzi zhuan by comparing it with selected early fiction from other cultures, such as The Golden Ass, One Thousand and One Nights, and Mesopotamian mythologies, and to investigate the authorship, readership, transmission, and consumption of early Chinese fiction from a social perspective. The last step is to distinguish between the real and imagined geography in the text and reconstruct the transportation geography of King Mu’s travels using a historical geographical approach. It is hoped that this comprehensive research on Mutienzi zhuan will contribute to the study of Chinese paleography, history, geography and literature.

The notion of craft has for a long time been closely tied to making objects using materials produced through handmade processes. It has often been seen as activities performed by two different groups of makers: professional artisans; and do-it-yourself (DIY) amateur hobbyists. However, the emergence of new digital fabrication technologies in recent years has brought a significant shift in the maker group and culture. With the new digital means of making objects, theoretically, anyone can customize and produce one’s own goods. The concept has been embodied through the maker movement which refers to a cultural trend that places a high value on making physical things using digital technologies and craft skills. The idea of digital craft has been present for the past two decades. Individual practitioners started producing work with hybrid craft techniques, and proved the potential benefits of digital craft in expanding creativity and appealing to a wider audience. However, examinations of how the new technologies will affect the craft community and modes of production and distribution in the craft industry have been scarce. In response, this research aims to investigate how digital fabrication technologies influence craft practices as part of the maker movement. It also aims to identify challenges and opportunities for professional and amateur makers involved in conventional craft practices. Explorative qualitative studies will be carried out through digital fabrication workshops with twenty local makers. Through participant observation, pre-workshop and post-workshop interviews, and artifact (workshop outcome) analysis, the purpose of the study is to explore how different groups of makers’ practice and value perceptions are changed by the introduction of new digital tools. Additionally, the study will address issues that need to be resolved in both practical and socio-cultural contexts. It is expected that the findings from the study will have implications for the following aspects: It will provide an understanding of the significance of maker culture as socio-cultural practices and as a means to foster creativity and related industries.

十一世紀的黃庭堅（1045-1105）號山谷，是型塑北宋詩歌與禪宗形態、內涵的代表。其《山谷內集》有詩逾七百首，是今人認知山谷詩學、禪學的核心文獻。該集歷來以難解而聞名，註家甚少。自古及今的華人世界內唯宋代任淵（1090？-1164？）曾遍註內集詩，又唯錢鍾書（1910-1998）選註的逾八十首為當代學界山谷詩註的典範。然而，十五世紀室町時代的日本禪僧萬里集九（1428-1507？）曾著書《帳中香》，以漢文遍註內集。萬里獨特的知識背景、闡釋立場與心態，使得該書在詮解旨趣異於華人註家的同時，尤在認識《山谷內集》中詩禪關係的問題上，深具洞察。然此書的存在及其重要性，長期未為學界所熟知。本計劃即將針對萬里集九及其《帳中香》展開首次全面研究。筆者尤其將通過檢視該書以禪解詩的獨特路徑，反思《山谷內集》固有的內典化傾向，進而重新認識黃庭堅所引領的迥異於唐代傳統的宋型詩禪新風。同時，本計劃亦將有助學界重新探索，近古以降的中日兩國在詩禪文化上曾有的互動與共性。

Starting from the 1990s, the number of artists, dealers, curators, critics and collectors in China has grown exponentially. Apart from the record high prices which has caught the attention of the international media, contemporary Chinese art has become a hot topic and form of luxury goods - both within and outside the art world. Apart from the machinations of the art market, the era has also seen proponents of “culture”, fostering a national strategy in order to fill the ideological gap left by the social problems associated with China’s economic reforms. This strategy became a trend of thought among elites and government officials. Ever since the 17th Party Congress, the tagline, "enhance culture as part of soft power” became the official “guiding ideology” of the Chinese Communist Party in its plan for sustainable development. In recent years, the term "Chinese Dream" has been adapted to promote China's "soft power" by exhibiting modern Chinese values locally and globally. If contemporary Chinese art presents a set of conditions whereby players in the art market and institutions are able to directly or indirectly involve themselves in the monetary, symbolic and political exchange of art, those proposed conditions have prompted me to consider how contemporary art museums have aligned with the implementation of the national policy of “soft power.” To that end, in this project, I will study a few private museums that have been established in recent years in Shanghai, which include the Long Museum, the Yuz Museum, and the Shanghai 21st Century Minsheng Art Museum. This project aims to by-pass conventional art history approaches. Instead, it employs an ethnographical approach to investigate the story of contemporary Chinese art and its connection and relevance to the specific spaces and practices of the proposed museums. By evaluating recent Chinese cultural policies and providing my own descriptive experience that is informed by the narrative model of this project, this research will draw on insights from different players’ participation of museum activities to explain how individuals are inspired by the potentialities of the new locations of art production and consumption. The study will aim to question the shifting relationship of contemporary art to the state under the backdrop of the current cultural policy and how the establishment of contemporary art museums has become an important benchmark of cultural reform and urban renewal.

This project attempts to thoroughly study the melodies of tōgaku (Tang music) in Motomasa no Fue-fu (The Flute Score of Motomasa), an early twelfth-century Japanese source. Tōgaku was a repertory of entertainment music imported from China between the seventh and the ninth centuries, and was widely performed by musicians and aristocrats at the imperial court until its decline in the late fourteenth century. Japanese musicians compiled a large number of musical scores for the purposes of preservation and transmission of this repertory in Japan. Numerous reliable manuscript copies of these historical scores, together with a small number of the originals, have survived in Japan to the present. Although substantial research has been conducted on the development of tōgaku in the light of the music recorded in historical scores compiled before the end of the fourteenth century, a crucial question remains to be answered. This pertains to the background for the emergence of a new system of rhythmic signs in the notation compiled in the eleventh and the twelfth centuries. This system of rhythmic signs signifies a slightly different rhythmic structure of the melodies when compared with the structure indicated by the standard system. As historians of Japanese music know only too well, the importation of Chinese entertainment music was in fact part of the large-scale adoption of Chinese culture. This adoption was followed by a long process of assimilation of the imported culture in accordance with the needs of the Japanese. Given that the new system of rhythmic sign emerged in the period when the assimilation of Chinese culture reached its peak, it was likely the product of this assimilation. A thorough study of the tōgaku notation in Motomasa no Fue-fu may, therefore, shed important light on the development of this system of rhythmic signs since the score notates the tōgaku melodies performed during the apogee of adaptation of Chinese culture, namely the tenth and the eleventh centuries. This project will first elucidate and decipher the tablature signs and notational symbols in Motomasa no Fue-fu, and then followed by a transcription of the tōgaku notation. Through a comprehensive analysis of the transcribed melodies together with the textual information in Motomasa no Fue-fu, the project aims at uncovering the background for the use of a new system of rhythmic signs in the tōgaku notation and its cultural implications for the assimilation of Chinese cultures in Heian-period Japan.

Hong Kong television drama helped defined the Hong Kong identities, and its export into China has influenced generations of mainland audience. However, recent years has witnessed a “reverse flow”: many Hong Kong youngsters have taken an interest or developed a preference for television drama produced in China, such as Scarlet Heart (步步驚心), My Sunshine (何以笙簫默), and Eternal Love (三生三世十里桃花). This phenomenon is far from self-evident because all Hong Kongers’ national identifications drop after 2008, and this tendency is most evident in the youngsters. This project, thus, addresses an important and intriguing question: why, in light of significant anti-Mainland sentiments among Hong Kong youth, are Mainland TV dramas popular with this audience?

This study aims to examine the effectiveness of using mobile sequencing software namely Garageband for iOS and Walk Band for Android as a tool to facilitate music creation for the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE) Music Examination. Paper 3, Creating I, is one of the core papers of the HKDSE music examination. Although it is a core paper, there is a lack of teaching and learning materials specifically designed for this paper with the use of technology. GarageBand and Walk Band are multifunctional applications which can realize and record music in real-time. With this handy device, students can create music anytime and anywhere. There are two phases in this study: in Phase 1 a selected group of music teachers and senior secondary students will be interviewed and perceptions and suggestions will be derived to formulate a composition pedagogy with the use of the application with a theoretical framework and practical teaching approaches. Phase 2 will be a multi-case study in which three pilot schools will be involved and music classes will be observed with the launch of the pedagogy for three months. In addition, teachers and students will be interviewed in order to validate the pedagogy. This study will provide a practical and validated pedagogy for school music teachers to prepare students for the HKDSE Music Examination.

In the Hong Kong context, the secretarial profession was considered one of the first whitecollar jobs for women, and became an indispensable component of the city’s economy in the latter half of the 20th century when Hong Kong gradually evolved into an international financial center. This project will trace the history of this phenomenon by using Sacred Heart Canossian College of Commerce (SHCCC) as a case study.

The present project will be the first to address this issue, exploring infants ’ relative sensitivity to and use of consonants, vowels and tones in Cantonese and French environments.