The arrival of new immigrants from Mainland China has been perceived as a social problem in Hong Kong in recent years. Many of these arrivals are school-age children who may have been brought up in a different culture and who come to Hong Kong for family reunion. This study sets out to explore the different adaptation pathways that the new arrival students have gone through, and to explain these students' academic success and failure.
A review of the recent literature on new arrival children suggests that their pre-arrival background and their post-arrival experiences have a significant impact on their adaptation pathways as well as school performance in Hong Kong. In other words, the new arrival students should not be treated as a homogeneous group seeking assimilation into the host society. The present study hence attempts to throw light on the new arrival students' individual post-arrival experiences, especially their experiences and performance at school, through in-depth interviews with fourteen students over an eleven- month period starting from December 2000.
Using social capital and cultural capital as the key analytic concepts, this study looks for explanations of divergent adaptation pathways and differential school performance. The findings show that supportive networks with the institutional agents is necessary for the new arrival students to activate the capital they possess, and to accumulate further capital for assimilating or accommodating to the society and culture of Hong Kong. By examining the process of adaptation in terms of activation and accumulation of capitals, this study attempts to shed light on the usefulness of cultural ecological theory in immigrant minority education studies. A typology of adaptation, namely "Transitional Adaptation", "Instrumental Adaptation", "Accommodative Adaptation", "Bicultural Adaptation" and "Marginality" is constructed to delineate the different pathways and capture the divergent experiences the new arrival