Four decades of ELT development in Hong Kong: Impact of global theories on the changing curricula, assessments and textbooks

Abstract

The past 40 years have witnessed significant development in ELT research, reflecting changes in learners’ language needs and the development of language learning/teaching methods in different times and places. The purpose of this study is to provide a systematic and comprehensive account of changing ELT methods (oral-structural approach, CLT and TBLT) in Hong Kong’s secondary education between 1975 and the present. By adopting Richards and Rodgers’s (2014) framework (approach, design and procedure), it examined how ELT theories have been transformed into local curricula (1975, 1983, 1999 and 2002/2007), public examination papers (1975–2016) and commercial textbooks (Longman, Oxford University Press) via a detailed content analysis. The findings suggest that despite the promotion of global ELT methods in the curricula, the design of public assessments and commercial textbooks tends to lag behind theories and pedagogical recommendations in the literature. In particular, changes in textbooks were relatively limited, although considerable attempts had been made to align textbook design with ELT trends. By considering various constraints in the theory-to-practice process, the paper offers suggestions for future research and language teaching particularly regarding the latest debate over the choice of the ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ version of task-based language teaching in EFL contexts.