Compares English-text reading speeds and oral-reading quality ratings of American university students to three groups of adult Asian English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) college students in America. Finds that, at least concerning Chinese or Korean, differences in EFL word reading were associated less with type of first-language orthography than…

Investigates changes in Hong Kong government's medium of instruction policy amid political, economic, and sociolinguistic changes in the last three decades. Explores the possible impact of the Chinese-medium instruction policy proposed in the wake of change of sovereignty on English-language learning. The theoretical underpinning of the study is…

Explores two Mandarin-speaking children's ability to refer to the past in mother-child conversation. The approach encompasses morphosyntactic, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic perspectives. Results show that the children tend to refer to immediate past spontaneously, but rely heavily on elicitation when referring to earlier past. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the inseparability of culture and language, presents three new metaphors relating to culture and language, and explores cultural content in specific language items through a survey of word associations. The survey was designed for native Chinese speakers in Chinese as well as for native English speakers in English. (Author/VWL)

Presents findings from a study of students' perspectives on changes in the public examination system in the English language in Hong Kong. Responses of 844 secondary school students under the old system (1994) and 443 under the new system (1995) suggest that the new system has a limited impact on teaching and student learning. (SLD)

Examined how peer interaction influenced Chinese-American high school students to adopt strategies of accommodation or resistance. Choice of strategy for the six students studied arose not only from the group's voluntary minority status, but from more local factors. Results are explored in terms of cultural ecological theory. (SLD)

This study used three experiments to study whether infant-directed (ID) or adult-directed (AD) speech facilitated the learning of Chinese vocabulary by adults whose native language was English and who had had no prior knowledge of Chinese. Results indicate that ID speech may play a pivotal role in early lexical acquisition. (51 references)…

Reviews the brief history of Chinese Americans in the United States and their contributions to librarianship. Describes the origin, purpose, programs, and activities of the Chinese American Librarians Association. (Contains 44 references.) (AEF)

Discusses recent changes in Chinese as a second/foreign language (CSL/FL) teaching and research, examining the diversification of contexts for CSL/FL learning in terms of learners needs, and advances in language learning research over the past 25 years that can provide a basis for informing teachers' choices in the classroom. (Author/VWL)

Contains a report of lessons the authors have been developing based on their group work in China. Lessons learned include understanding how cultural imperatives apply and work gets done in relation to planning, and being sensitive to the uniqueness of another culture's communication styles and attitudes about leadership. (Contains 36 references.)…

Introduces this volume of the journal, which focuses on language in education in post-colonial Hong Kong. Before Hong Kong was returned to China, Cantonese and English were the predominate languages; since the change of sovereignty, the status of Mandarin has increased tremendously. (Author/VWL)

To investigate the relationship between speech and meaning, a word recognition study was conducted that required 20 beginning learners of Chinese to pronounce and later identify in English 46 Chinese words. The correlational analysis indicated a significant relationship between being able to pronounce and being able to identify Chinese words.…

Describes the phonological acquisition of 129 monolingual Putonghua-speaking children, aged 1.6 to 4.6 years. Children's errors suggested that Putonghua-speaking children master four elements of Putonghua syllables in this order: (1) tones; (2) syllable-initial consonants; (3) vowels; and (4) syllable-final consonants. Suggests that the saliency…

Outlines concepts of language rights in the Hong Kong context. Considers development of a medium of instruction policy from the point of view of language rights and suggests that while policy enforcing Chinese medium of instruction is consonant with the language rights of the Cantonese majority, continued existence of an English-medium stream may…

Examined role of phonological awareness and visual-orthographic skills in Chinese reading acquisition among first, second, third, and fifth graders who had learned the Hanyu Pinyin script. Found that visual skills predicted reading success at lower grades; pinyin knowledge and ability to discriminate homophonic characters predicted reading success…