Past research has tended to ignore the emergence or existence of 'middle zone' varieties such as topolects or regiolects. In addition, attitudinal dynamics have received little attention, including their contribution towards the re-evaluation of the status of language varieties. Regarding the status of Cantonese, linguistic, political and cultural considerations are contradictory; the speakers themselves are widely held to believe that it is a dialect, but no objective surveys have ever been undertaken. This study reports on a comparative study of attitudes towards the status of Hong Kong Cantonese held by three groups of Chinese: 53 Hong Kong Cantonese speakers; 18 Mainland Chinese Cantonese speakers; and 72 Mainland Chinese Putonghua speakers. Bell's Sociolinguistic Typology was used as the framework for an open-ended questionnaire, supplemented by a Magnitude Continuum (an unmarked language-dialect scale). The varied perspectives held by each group can be traced to their different political and linguistic situations, which touch issues of identity. Results confirm that Cantonese would more accurately be classified as an emerging mid-zone variety. This has implications for short-term language planning, especially in the education system, and the long-term autonomy and survival of Cantonese.
[Copyright of Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2010.509507]

During the last two decades of colonial rule, a wide gulf existed between policy and practice in Hong Kong's English-medium secondary schools: while English was the medium of textbooks, assignments and examinations, Cantonese and Cantonese-English mixed code were the dominant media of classroom communication. Although mixed-mode instruction was defended in some quarters, during the 1990s it was regarded in government circles as the main cause of unsatisfactory English standards. To eliminate mixed-mode instruction, and thereby ensure the consistent use of English or Chinese as teaching media, the postcolonial government introduced a controversial language policy in 1998 which permitted only 112 schools to remain English-medium, while most schools were forced to switch their medium of instruction from English to Chinese. This paper presents the findings of an investigation which aimed to gauge the extent to which the new policy has been translated into classroom practice in the 'reformed' English-medium stream. The findings indicate that teachers and students make greater use of English in the classroom than their counterparts during the era of 'mass' English-medium education, although, as might be expected, the language-learning experience provided in the 'reformed' English-medium stream generally falls short of the full immersion programme envisaged by policy makers.
[Copyright of Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01434630802147940]

Although cultural stereotypes of Asian students as being prone to rote learning, passive and teacher-dependent have been under criticism, the issue of the extent to which Asian heritage culture impacts on Asian students' learning attitudes and behaviour warrants further investigation. This paper reports on an empirical study which compares self-directed language learning attitudes, strategies and motivation among university students in mainland China and Hong Kong. In doing so, the author aims to investigate: (1) whether there are any differences/similarities in learning attitudes, strategies and motivation between these two groups of Asian students; (2) how these differences/similarities could be explained in terms of the cultural (i.e. Confucian) traditions or situational factors such as institutional contexts and social environments. Data were collected through both questionnaire and interviews. The findings of this study suggest that institutional contexts and social environments rather than cultural traditions tend to determine students' attitudes towards, strategies in and motivation for learning English. Implications for illuminating the validity of Littlewood's (1999) 10 predictions about the forms of learner autonomy in East Asian traditions are then discussed.
[Copyright of Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01434630802307890]

A word, even when considered monosemic, generally has a cluster of meanings, depending on the mental representation of the referent by the speaker/writer or listener/reader. The variation is even more noticeable across cultures. This paper investigates the different ways in which cultural knowledge helps in the interpretation of English lexical items. After a brief review of the traditional World Englishes structural perspective, the paper analyses the various ways in which the schema helps in the construction of lexical meaning: it helps to decode the denotative meaning of some words with possible multiple interpretations; to perceive the referential boundaries; to understand the connotative meaning; to modulate meaning, demoting some features and promoting others; to understand the physical elements which contribute to the mental representation of some words; to perceive the bodily movements and other paralinguistic elements which contribute to the construction of the meaning of some words; to perceive the salience of a word within a cultural community; to perceive and predict collocates; to perceive cultural assumptions; to perceive political politeness and taboos; to distinguish transactional language from interactional language, and so on. The study is shown to have implications for lexicography and for English Language teaching.
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The gendered speech in a foreign language has been found to pose barriers for learners due to different gender norms associated with their mother tongue and the foreign language. The problem is especially serious with the masculine and feminine forms of speech in the Japanese language, as these are strongly linked with social inequality between men and women. While a number of previous studies have been conducted on feminine style of Japanese and foreign language learners, still little is known of masculine speech of Japanese and foreign professionals who use Japanese in their intercultural work contexts. The present paper investigates attitudes towards the use of masculine Japanese among Hong Kong professionals. It includes the finding that, unlike in monolingual contexts, in multilingual contexts masculine Japanese was perceived among the respondents as projecting not only the quality of Japanese masculinity but also of group solidarity and native speaker status in the language and culture. While the respondents felt that it could be an effective device for constructing their professional identity, the decision to use it appeared to involve a careful analysis of their professional contexts and identity considerations. The implications of the analysis for teaching Japanese as a foreign language are discussed.
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Hong Kong children's comprehension of Chinese and English text is of concern to parents and teachers since school leavers need to be proficient readers both of Chinese and English. Although Chinese has been officially designated the medium of instruction in most secondary schools, many parents want their children to be taught in English-medium schools for, although Hong Kong is now a Chinese region, being literate in English is still highly prized by the public. A comparison was made of the bilingual reading attainment of Hong Kong primary students, using instruments and procedures used in the 2001 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study. The average standard of reading English was below the international average, and only 70% of the average standard of reading in Chinese. Only 7% of students read English as well as age-related peers in English-speaking countries. Whereas this minority can be taught via English to no academic detriment, most students understand text much less well in English than in Chinese. The best readers were good both in English and Chinese, the poor readers being particularly weak readers of English. Being taught via English enhanced students' general English reading ability, and being taught in Cantonese enhanced their Chinese reading ability.
[Copyright of Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01434630903514212]