This study examined the overlap of dyslexia and specific language impairment (SLI) in Cantonese-Chinese-speaking children. Thirty children with a prior diagnosis of SLI and 9 normal controls, aged between 6;0 and 11;3, participated. The children with SLI were tested for language impairment and dyslexia. Seven retained a diagnosis of SLI but were dyslexia-free (SLI-only), 13 received a comorbid diagnosis of dyslexia (SLI-D), and SLI had become history (SLI-H) in the other 10 children with no co-morbid diagnoses of dyslexia. The SLI-only group did worse on textual comprehension, but better on left-right reversal (an orthographic skill), than the SLI-D group. The SLI-only and the SLI-D group shared the same range of cognitive deficits relative to age norms and showed no difference in phonological processing. The SLI-D group did worse than the normal group on phonological representation, and both the SLI-only and the SLI-D group had difficulties with morphological awareness.
[Copyright of Scientific Studies of Reading is the property of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10888430903242043]

Hong Kong's official language policy of 'biliteracy' (Chinese and English) and 'trilingualism' (Cantonese, Putonghua, English), announced after the reversion to China in 1997, claims to address actualities of language use in the territory, remove inequities between English and Chinese, and consolidate the linguistic platform to launch Hong Kong as 'Asia's World City'. Public discussion of and controversy over this policy immediately followed, and have continued in the past decade. But they have tended to focus on the implementation of the policy in education, specifically the medium of instruction in schools, to the exclusion of most other areas of language use. Drawing on recent examples of translingual practice in literary writing, this essay argues first that such actually existing practices are far more verbally nuanced, self-knowing and self-reflexive than the official policy would allow, and second, that they instantiate Hong Kong's identity as 'Asian', which challenges both the official and public focus on Chinese and English. The 'world' and 'world city' that emerge from such writing are historically located in the transition before and after 1997, when the writers acquired their languages in schools. They are also provisional, generated by a poeisis of experimentation that attends to cultural change as language change in - and as - everyday life.
[Copyright of Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2010.516100]

Background: Recent government initiatives in Hong Kong have focused on raising the participation of students from South Asian backgrounds in mainstream schools, to encourage their further integration into Hong Kong's educational system and society. These students' learning in mainstream schools takes place within the context of the central curriculum and, thus, students face the challenge of learning Chinese as an additional language. Mainstream schools sometimes provide additional support, including the provision of bilingual teaching assistants to address the specific needs of the students from South Asian backgrounds.
Purpose: This exploratory study aims to investigate the roles of bilingual teaching assistants in Hong Kong.
Method: Interviews were held with two bilingual teaching assistants from the South Asian community in Hong Kong who were working in a mainstream secondary school. Teachers from the school were also interviewed. Open-ended interview questions focused on perceptions of the roles and responsibilities of bilingual teaching assistants in Chinese-language-medium classes. The data were analysed to identify any emergent patterns and themes.
Findings: The research findings indicate that the bilingual teaching assistants from the South Asian community not only took on the role of helping the learners from South Asian backgrounds in Chinese language acquisition, but also acted as cultural mediators between mainstream school culture and the culture of the South Asian community in Hong Kong.
Conclusions: This small-scale exploratory research study suggests the importance of the role of bilingual teaching assistants in promoting equal access to quality education for ethnic minorities in Hong Kong.
[Copyright of Educational Research is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131881.2010.524753]

This study was originally designed to explore the impact of a distributed approach to developing curriculum leadership among schoolteachers. Previous papers have focused on reporting evidence of teacher learning in the process of engaging teachers in various types of curriculum decision-making in an innovation project based on interview data. This article reports a discourse analysis of the interactions based on the visual data in videotaped meetings between teachers in a Chinese curriculum development team and shows that teacher participation is constrained by the leadership styles of the positional leaders in the team in the second action cycle in the project. The mediational effects of the leadership styles invite policy-makers and school management to rethink the effectiveness of school-based approaches to curriculum development in enhancing teacher learning and development.
[Copyright of Curriculum Journal is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09585176.2010.504577]

Data of item responses to the Hong Kong Specific Learning Difficulties Behaviour Checklist from 673 Chinese primary grade students were analyzed using the dichotomous Rasch measurement model. Rasch scaling suggested that the data fit the model adequately with a latent dimension of global dyslexic dysfunctioning. Estimates of item attributes and person functioning on the same logit scale allowed the locations of person functioning to be interpreted in terms of item content. The substantial correlation between person estimates and external criterion measures (literacy and cognitive skills) provided support for the validity of the checklist in identifying children at risk for dyslexia. A common cutoff score based on person estimates across grades is suggested to replace the different cutoff scores based on conventional test scores for different grades. Implications of the findings for the use and the future development or refinement of the checklist are discussed.
[Copyright of Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19404150903524598]