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The various possibilities that social media offers to language learners and teachers have long been recognized by researchers within the field of language instruction, and many studies have been carried out in an attempt to address and unpack its potential contributions. This paper aims to review such research on the use of mainstream social media in language teaching and learning published in "Computer Assisted Language Learning," a top tier (i.e., Q1) journal indexed in major citation index systems (e.g., Arts & Humanities Citation Index, the Social Sciences Citation Index and Scopus), between the years 2016-2020 inclusive. For the purposes of the study, a total of 23 articles that meet the selection criteria is reviewed and presented in five sections. The first section deals with the majority of the articles, which are found to be on the use of social networking in language teaching and learning. In the following sections, studies on the use of videoconferencing, wikis, blogging and forums are discussed. Collectively, the studies reviewed in this paper outline a critical role for the use of social media in language instruction and the study aims to provide valuable insights for researchers, teachers and learners.

Seamless learning has a significance that has been increasing in recent years, and an increasing number of studies on the subject in the literature draws attention. This study aimed to examine the research on seamless learning between 1996 and 2020 with the bibliometric analysis method. The Scopus database was used in the collection of the data. After various screening processes, a total of 389 publications were included in the analysis. Descriptive analysis and bibliometric analysis were used in the analysis of the data. The distribution of publications by years, types of publications, sources, and languages were analyzed in the research. Additionally, visual maps were created with analyses of co-author, cocitation, and co-word. At the end of the study, it was seen that there has been an increase in the number of publications from the past to the present, articles and papers were predominant, and that most of the studies were carried out in English. As a result of bibliometric analysis, it was concluded that the most efficient countries in seamless learning were the United Kingdom, the United States, and Singapore. Also, it has been determined that the National Institute of Education, Center for International Education and Exchange, and Kyushu University institutions are dominant. The most frequently mentioned authors cited in studies in many different fields are M. Sharples, L.-H. Wong, and H. Ogata. According to the co-word analysis, the keywords seamless learning, mobile learning, ubiquitous learning, and mobile-assisted language learning stand out in the field of seamless learning.

South Asian economies has witnessed very slow growth over the years and the gap has widened manifold between other nations of Asia particularly East Asian nations and South Asian nations. This paper examines co-integration between the economic growth and reach of higher education in South Asian nations explaining this disparity. The research employed an econometric panel co-integration investigation to analyse the long run relationship of higher education and economic growth among these nations. The research confirmed positive long run causality between the economic growth of the South Asian nations and gross enrolment ratio of higher education. So, if the South Asian nations continue with their existing pattern of paying less attention to higher education by allocating low share of investment on it, poor human capital formation would result in growing further economic disparity between developed and South Asian nations where rich nations would remain richer and poor nations would remain poor with the gap remaining unabridged. This research will serve as an aid to policy makers, educators and financers of South Asian nations to bridge the gap between high- and low-income nations. The focus on the quantum of spending on higher education by the government will help improve the reach of tertiary education and build economic prosperity in these nations.

Interpretive frameworks may be helpful to understand narratives, yet they also risk displacing unique information of the research context. In this paper, we argue that such is the case in narrative inquiry studies of English language teaching set in the Asian context, perhaps due to the pressure to use familiar interpretive frameworks that are sanctioned by scholars. Through meta-ethnography, we examined recent narrative inquiry studies set in Asia. It was observed that the research findings do not offer any critical insights about the context of the study; instead, they add to the prevalence of broad constructs of English language education, such as the components of identity. For future narrative inquiry research, we recommend researchers to consider utilizing local meanings pertinent to the study context as an analytical lens, as a means to Asianize the field.

While infusion of technology into schools has been one of the top priorities of the education reform agenda across the world, findings from many large-scale international assessments indicate that students' use of information and communication technology (ICT) has mixed effects on their academic achievements. In this paper, we argue that these ambivalent findings were due to the oversight of the indirect effects of ICT use mediated by other ICT-related variables. We employed multilevel structural equation modelling to unfold the relationship between students' ICT use and their academic achievements based on PISA 2015 data. The results indicated that students' autonomy in ICT use and students' interest in ICT use were found to have significant positive direct effects on students' academic achievements at both within-school and between-school levels. These two variables played a significant role in mediating the indirect effects of ICT use outside school for schoolwork and ICT resources on students' academic achievements. On the contrary, ICT resources and ICT use at school exerted either no direct effect or a negative direct effect on students' academic achievements and students' perceived autonomy related to ICT use, suggesting that mere provision and use of ICT resources in school did not necessarily guarantee success in student performance. At the school level, school's transformational leadership and collaborative climate helped promote students' autonomy in ICT use.

This paper compared technical/vocational education in: Germany, Australia, Finland, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, and Nigeria, and found that technical/vocational education was given proper attention in countries considered except Nigeria, where it was handled with laissez faire attitude. Set-Up of Technical/Vocational Schooling, Curriculum, Mode of Training and Conduct of Final Examination, Financing and Motivating Factor was the basis for comparison, and Nigeria lagged behind in these. Amongst the lessons for Nigeria's technical/vocational education sector are that her technical/vocational education sector be dual, while students should be appropriately motivated. Schools should collaborate with registered organizations (work-integrated learning) to train the students. The paper recommended that there should be national conference strictly on the status of technical/vocational education in Nigeria, so that necessary solutions could be proffered to the problems facing this part of the education sector. Finally, manufacturing organizations, etc. should be involved in the drafting of curriculum of the technical/vocational education in the country, while taking into consideration peculiarities of Nigeria as a sovereign nation.

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) by the OECD measures student study time during formal school periods and during periods of out-of-school-time (OST). The purpose of these items is to account for differences in country to country achievement levels. However, analyses of the impact of additional study time on student achievement have produced conflicting results across countries. While more time given to a school subject within formal school is positively related to achievement in that topic, more time spent on OST is negatively related to average achievement between and within countries. The paper proposes a reconceptualization of OST and achievement by integrating theoretical frameworks of study time, student abilities, and student feelings of efficacy. The results of a descriptive and conceptual analysis of a set of new survey items in the 2015 PISA for 22 countries shows that students benefit from additional study time by having increased feelings of efficacy in a school subject (such as science) but not in measurable levels of achievement. While country to country levels OST participation rates are different, the patterns of relationships between OST participation, student achievement, and attitudes are similar.

Like all organisations, good governance is a fundamental requirement for the responsible and accountable management of universities in general and open universities in particular. This is to ensure that these (open) universities remain relevant to their mission of facilitating unfettered access to higher education for citizens and at the same time continue being reliable contributors to personal and institutional developments, the vital ingredients to maintaining sustained national development. While several studies have, in the past, been conducted on governance of universities, almost all of them have centred around conventional, face-to-face institutions. Not much published literature is in evidence on the governance of Open Universities. This paper, drawing from a study on the governance of a few open universities in Asia, tries to discuss the nature of their challenges, and the lessons that can be drawn from their practices and experience. The study focused on aspects relating to institutional autonomies such as curriculum, budgeting and financial management, admission standards, conferment of qualifications, academic staff appointments, development and promotions and research policies. Our findings indicate that, similar to conventional systems, the state plays a crucial role in many aspects of governance both in publicly funded and privately supported institutions. Recent attempts at governance transformation towards greater institutional autonomies is beginning to show limited changes in some but not all jurisdictions studied.

Cross-border higher education institutions are considered a main way to fulfill the educational internalization in Mainland China; to some extent they represent the attitude of entering the international market. In this paper, the history, status quo, and future of Chinese-foreign cooperatively-run schools are analyzed and discussed. Cross-border higher education institutions in Mainland China have experienced the process from accidental and disorder to a systematic and quality orientation.

The status of English as a global language has played a significant role in contemporary language education policies across the world. In East Asia, the hegemony of English has been reflected in a number of central governments' policies of recruiting native English-speaking teachers (NESTs) to participate in English language education. This paper focuses on the NESTs recruitment policies in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan with the aim of examining how teacher professionalism is represented in these policy discourses and how this conceived teacher professionalism impacts on English teaching and learning in these countries. Through the analysis of policy texts and documents, we argue that teacher professionalism has been assigned a different agenda by the governments who subscribe to "native speaker norms" and legitimise unqualified and inexperienced NESTs in the profession of English language teaching (ELT). These anti-professionalism policies have not achieved the intended consequence of improving students' English proficiency, but have instead resulted in the unintended consequences of damaging the quality of English instruction and jeopardising the professional identity of local non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) in these countries. The results reveal an urgent need to evaluate the effectiveness of these NEST recruitment programmes.

The Changing Academic Profession (CAP) international survey was designed in part to consider the effects of globalization on the work context and activities of academics in 19 countries or regions around the world. This paper draws from a subset of these data to explore the extent to which academics are globally connected in their research and teaching, and the ways this connectedness relates to global migration. Across multiple measures, immigrant academics (i.e., academics working in countries where they were not born and did not receive their first degree) were more globally connected than national academics (i.e., those working in the countries of their birth and first degree). Global migration by academic staff is clearly a major contributor to the internationalization of higher education institutions, yet there was no evidence these contributions led to enhanced career progress or job satisfaction for immigrant academics relative to national academics. The international expertise and experience of immigrant academics may not be sufficiently recognized and valued by their institutions.

Background: In PISA 2009, seven East Asian countries rank high among the 65 participating countries, but some of the differences among the seven countries are small to be of substantive meaning. Aims: This paper is an attempt to fine tune the comparisons for better understanding of the situation in East Asian. Sample: Data of the seven East Asian countries were pulled from the PISA 2009 report and re-analyzed. Method: Pair-wise comparisons were made by way of effect size on Reading, Mathematics, and Science. Results: The overall patterns of differences show that Shanghai-China is definitely ahead of all the others. Korea, Hong Kong-China, and Singapore are similar in performance and form a cluster. Japan, Chinese Taipei, and Macao-China are similar and form another cluster at the lower end of achievement. Conclusion: Instead of ranking the seven countries with seven different ranks, it is more meaningful to cluster them into three groups to avoid spurious precision. In other words, league tables should not differentiate where there are no meaningful differences. (Contains 4 tables.)

This article presents the authors' critique of lessons proposed by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21). The authors initiate a discussion about content that they hope will play out in schoolhouses and statehouses across the country. They take on a different task: they present a handful of lesson ideas from P21 that could enhance studies of academic content. They present examples of content-rich education in which they hope P21 will use as models to revise its current skills maps. (Contains 11 endnotes.)

Background: The Project Yi Jin (PYJ), an alternative pathway for secondary school leavers and adults to further their education, has been receiving full support from the government, the Federation for Continuing Education in Tertiary Institutions (FCE) in Hong Kong and the public. Graduates of PYJ have the equivalent academic status of their counterparts in the main stream education. It was first implemented in 2000/01 by the FCE and has been offered to more than 35,000 students by 2006/07. With the success of the programme as a safety-net for a mass education system, it should continue to function more vigorously as new reforms are being implemented in the Hong Kong education scene in the future. The Chief Executive in his 2004 Policy Address has set out the direction to develop a new secondary and university system, i.e., (3+3) for secondary + 4 (tertiary) [the old one is (3+2+2)+3], to be launched in 2010/11, that will effectively prepare the next generation to cope with the challenges of the 21st century and the demands of the rapidly developing knowledge-based society. The new system, together with substantial modified curricula including the newly developed applied learning courses (ApL), is supposed to be able to look after all secondary students. Aims and focus of discussion: This paper aims to argue the necessity of launching a new version of Project Yi Jin (nPYJ) concurrently together with the new 3+3+4 academic system. In light of the contemporary global educational systems as compared to that of Hong Kong, it is postulated that the launching of nPYJ as a continuation of the successful PYJ is both legitimate and indispensable with regard to the carefully observed current global fashion of lifelong learning and continuing education in which diversity, equity, and flexibility are highly valued. Method: A comprehensive comparative review was carried out on eleven selected oriental and occidental countries and regions, namely, Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, South Korea, United Kingdom, United States, China, Taiwan, Singapore and Macao, focusing on the worldwide trend of constant high school drop-out rate as well as the mentioned countries' respective senior secondary schooling articulation policy leading to higher education, in particular shedding light on the establishment of alternative pathways towards tertiary education alongside the conventional educational track. Conclusion: With the literature backdrop and empirical support, it is shown that high school drop-outs are inevitable no matter how well-defined an education system may be. Thus this is where the "safety-net" contingency plan is found essential. A new version of Project Yi Jin (nPYJ), to be offered in parallel with the Hong Kong's new 3+3+4 secondary academic curricula, is indispensable to the new educational structure in the territory which fundamentally helps transform the conventionally somewhat segregated and elite educational system into a mass one. Regarding the curricular design, both PYJ and nPYJ will focus on generic skills and a wide range of electives will be offered as well to arouse students' interest of study. (Contains 1 figure, 1 table and 5 footnotes.)

This study examines generalized trust and trust in institutions in Confucian Asia, covering six countries namely, China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam, and one dependent region, Hong Kong. Using data from the 2006 AsiaBarometer Survey, our study affirms the reliability and validity of using a two-item scale to measure generalized trust. Our analysis suggests that due to demographic differences, there are variations in the level of generalized trust of countries in Confucian Asia, despite the fact that these societies share a similar background in Confucian philosophy. The relationships between generalized trust and political trust, and between generalized trust and trust in public institutions, are weak but positive. The positive relationship between generalized trust and trust in economic institutions is only significant for some of the economies, while trust in international institutions has the weakest relationship with generalized trust for all societies. We conclude the paper with research implications.

The paper reviews Asia-Pacific higher education and university research, focusing principally on the "Confucian" education nations Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong China, Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam. Except for Vietnam, these systems exhibit a special developmental dynamism--still playing out everywhere except Japan--and have created a distinctive model of higher education more effective in some respects than systems in North America, the English-speaking world and Europe where the modern university was incubated. The Confucian Model rests on four interdependent elements: (1) strong nation-state shaping of structures, funding and priorities; (2) a tendency to universal tertiary participation, partly financed by growing levels of household funding of tuition, sustained by a private duty, grounded in Confucian values, to invest in education; (3) "one chance" national examinations that mediate social competition and university hierarchy and focus family commitments to education; (4) accelerated public investment in research and "world-class" universities. The Model has downsides for social equity in participation, and in the potential for state interference in executive autonomy and academic creativity. But together with economic growth amid low tax regimes, the Confucian Model enables these systems to move forward rapidly and simultaneously in relation to each and all of mass tertiary participation, university quality, and research quantity and quality.

Since the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, Asia has begun the race for economic supremacy at the global level. The so-called "Four Asian Tigers" are those countries which have continually experienced rapid and significant economic growth over the last half of century and comprise the high growth and income economies of Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan. These East Asian countries were largely considered as economic models since their growth rates of real per capita gross domestic product in the period 1960-1995 reached around 6% per year. As economic growth represents the outcome of specific issues, the paper aims to identify and present the main factors that contributed to the meteoric growth of the Asian Tigers by focusing on the economies of three of them, namely Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea. The methodological approach was based on a quantitative method. The paper argues that important lessons related to economic growth could be drawn from the valuable experience of these countries. Also, it identifies and presents some of the most important factors, such as the developmental state and the rapid industrialization, that highly contributed to their impressive economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]