Thursday, April 30, 2009

Pop Culture Seminars_2@HKIEd


May 6, 2009 Wednesday
Hong Kong Institute of Education

Popular Culture and Education in Hong Kong
Series Seminars 2

1. Pre-service language teachers in film directors' chairs
Randal Holme, Hong Kong Institute of Education
Alice Chik, City University of Hong Kong

Film, video and drama have a long pedigree in language teaching as tools for listening comprehension and developing listening for speaking and writing activities . Drama-based techniques have also been used formally to mount target language theatre productions or informally to prepare students for the performance aspects of target language use in scenarios, simulations and guided fantasies. This presentation tracks a film-making project conducted by a group of student teachers in a local secondary school. It will look at the student teachers’ attempts to master film and script writing techniques in English whilst trying to impart them to a less than enthusiastic group of secondary school students. Its conclusions will challenge some of the fundamental myths about the ‘Facebook/YouTube’ generation, by suggesting that the project may say as much about the limitations of professional training and project time frames as about the usefulness of film-making projects in language teaching.




2. Sexy, Naughty, Bitchy: The public pedagogy of Asian female singers' English music videos
Phil Benson, Hong Kong Institute of Education

Sexy, Naughty, Bitchy is the title of a song recorded by Thai singer Tata Young and its accompanying music video (MV). Tata Young is one of several Asian female singers who have recently recorded in English. As the title of her song suggests, these artists’ English productions often problematize Asian ethnicities and gender roles through the use of sex-positive lyrics and visual images that are untypical of their Asian-language productions. Viewing engagement with popular music as a kind of identity work, my presentation explores the implications of this new trend through analysis of several thousand YouTube comments on recent English songs by Tata Young, Utada Hikaru, Koda Kumi and Jolin Tsai. It focuses on the ways in which identity work is triggered off by three main questions: (1) Should Asian singers sing in English? (2) Are Asian singers who sing in English ‘really’ Asian? (3) Should Asian female singers be so up-front in their presentations of sexuality? The paper argues that by destabilizing familiar triangulations of language, ethnicity and gender, these singers and their MVs are playing an important role in ‘public pedagogies’ of local, regional and international identity in Asia.

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