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

The study of Individual Differences in Second Language Acquisition has long been an established research area. However, researchers have often worked in separate areas, for example, motivation, anxiety and learning strategies. Their studies have enriched our knowledge of the mechanisms in shaping Individual Differences, yet, very little is known about their developmental nature. In another area of Second Language Acquisition research, studies focusing mainly on learners in target-language communities, indicate that learners voice their individual differences through the construction of second language identities. These studies primarily focused on adult language learners in target language communities and yet little is known about pre-tertiary level learners studying a second language in the regions in which they have grown up.
This study was designed to explore the development of individual differences of Hong Kong English learners. Adopting a qualitative research method, ten learners from age 8 to 18 (5 females and 5 males) were interviewed three times over a two-year period. The interviews were scheduled to match the learners' transitions across key learning stages, for instance, from primary to secondary school, and from secondary school to tertiary institution. The data were analyzed in a two-tier system: narrative analysis and the analysis of narrative. The findings were presented through the ten language learners’ stories and a thematic analysis on domains of learning: home, school and out-of-class.
Findings show that Hong Kong English learners emphasized different realms of learning during different stages of their learning. Second, as learners matured, their communities of comparative others expanded and their conceptualizations of being different from their comparative others were refined. Third, the learners processed their learning experiences into future language learning orientation. Finally, participants developed their individual differences

The notion of 'balanced' bilingual development has often been used to refer to two languages which are spoken with equal proficiency during bilingual language acquisition. However, it is still not known how 'equal' the proficiencies of the two languages should be in order to achieve 'balanced' bilingualism. This case study aims to capture this notion of 'balanced' by using the following quantitative measures with respect to grammatical development: mean length of utterance (MLU), upper bound (UB) and lexical diversity (D). Direct comparison between two sets of absolute values does not reliably predict a bilingual child's language dominance due to potential typological differences two languages. The obtained values of these measures are shown to be comparable with those of monolingual children acquiring each language, and thus it is argued that bilingual children who attain such competence in each language are considered as having 'balanced' bilingual development.
This study concerns particularly two aspects of bilingual children: a) grammatical development and b) language use in terms of mixing. With regard to a), given that cross-linguistic influence is attested across studies of bilingual language development, this case study investigates the domains of null objects and wh-interrogatives to see if any cross-linguistic influence takes place. The qualitative similarities found in all Cantonese-English bilingual subjects suggest that the nature of the cross-linguistic influence is similar, whereas the quantitative differences imply that language dominance has determining effect on the phenomenon.
Concerning b), since language proficiency is often taken as one of the crucial factors predicting language mixing pattern, this present study examines the relationship of the mixing pattern in the Cantonese-English balanced bilingual child and her language proficiency. The results show that mixing occurs more frequently in Cantonese context than in English context.

Cross-border higher education has become an urgent agenda item for policy makers, and a major focus of scholarly enquiry. The existing literature mainly focuses on international flows, and pays less attention to flows across internal borders. The literature also underplays the complexity of forces which either push students to study away from home or pull them to new locations.
This thesis contributes to the literature by examining the distinctive determinants and characteristics of cross-border flows of mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong and Macao. This mobility within a single country has some similarities to international mobility because Hong Kong and Macao are Special Administrative Regions governed under different laws from the rest of China. Patterns in Hong Kong differ from those in Macao, and the territories are compared with each other as well as taken as a pair for comparison with other parts of the world. Hong Kong and Macao are hybrid in nature, with characteristics that are neither fully domestic nor fully international, and play a dual role both as destinations in themselves and as stepping-stones for further internationalization.
In a global market, both excess and differentiated demand trigger flows to the external locations in which various suppliers compete with and complement each other. The borders across which mainland Chinese students flow, both internationally and internally, are blurred and loosened by the interests of domestic and external actors and by the powers of globalization and neo-liberalism. Two categories of financial mechanisms of cross-border mobility, i.e. fee-paying and scholarship, serve as differentiated instruments of China’s social stratification and mobility. Fee-paying enhances social stratification, and scholarships favor social mobility.
The thesis presents a framework which includes analysis of internal and external dynamic forces. Among these forces are the actions of governments, institutions and individuals

Chinese-English bilingual education is common practice in Hong Kong schools. In 1997, the Education Department published the paper "Strong Guidelines for Medium of Instruction" to stop the teachers use mixed languages or code-switching in secondary schools. All students entering secondary schools have to undergo the Medium of Instruction Grouping Assessment (MIGA) which is the basis of the assignment to study in Chinese or English-medium schools. The present study of bilingual memory models in local primary school students attempts to provide a theoretical framework for the planning and implementation of bilingual education. It will also contribute towards the development of effective bilingual education in Hong Kong.
For student to communicate and study effectively and efficiently in a second language, a vocabulary of a certain number of words has to be stored up. Cognitive psychologists have four basic models in describing the semantic network of bilinguals. There are namely, Separate Store Model, Common-store Model, Verbal-imagery Dual-code Model and Overlapping Distribution Model. There is no single model that isconsidered to be comprehensive enough in explaining all observed phenomena.
Generally Hong Kong primary school students showed positive attitudes to English learning and English-based teaching. They are fully aware that English is an essential commercial language and a necessary learning tool, which would definitely bring helpful for further studies or future careers. Nevertheless, students also agreed that learning in their mother tongue Chinese or in a mixed code of Chinese and English would reduce their learning difficulties. Primary school students adopted varying strategies in learning Chinese and English. In learning Chinese vocabularies, students only relied on Chinese characters or the Chinese language system without utilizing the English language system. Whereas in learning English vocabularies, students still relied on Chinese resources