Chinese language teachers' orientation to reading instruction and their instructional practices

This study aimed to develop a set of quantitative instruments to investigate Hong Kong Chinese language teachers' orientation to reading instruction, their instructional practices and the relation between these two constructs under the implementation of the new curriculum. A total of 493 Chinese language teachers from 170 secondary schools in Hong Kong participated in this study. The findings of this study generally supported the psychometric properties of the instruments. Teachers participating in this study showed a higher level of acceptance of the competence-based orientation proposed in the new curriculum compared with the traditional text-based orientation. On the basis of self-report, teachers' orientation to reading instruction was closely related to their daily instructional practices although instructional practices were not directly observed. While competence-based orientation was the strongest predictor of the use of competence-based instructional strategies, text-based orientation was also found to be positively related to teachers' instruction. Teachers who believed in both competence-based and text-based orientation employed competence-based instructional strategies more frequently than did teachers who only believed in one or the other type of orientation. Implications of these findings for understanding and facilitating Hong Kong teachers' implementation of the new reading instructional approach and the limitations of the use of self-report measures are discussed.