*The author reports that secondary school language teachers at Hong Kong International School have adopted electronic mail and an electronic bulletin board system to carry out several classes for multinational students of English. The application of electronic communication for student assignments, assessments, the development of communication and thinking skills, and unexpected difficulties are then reviewed.

The paper discusses the victory of 14 Hong Kong secondary schools in appealing the government rule that requires them to use Cantonese instead of English as the medium of instruction starting from September 1998.

The paper reports that to explain why teachers in Hong Kong find using their mother tongue essential in teaching English language, four pre-service English teacher-trainees kept journals and did audio-recording everyday during their two-month practicuum.

The author reports that, though pre-service English teacher trainees are often told to teach English through English, many find teaching English without using the mother tongue impossible in actual teaching situations in Hong Kong. To explore the extent of gap between theory and practice, the author arranged 71 student teachers at sub-degree levels to fill in parallel questionnaires before and after their practicum. How student teachers may deal with this teaching situation is then suggested.

The paper reports the findings of a large-scale survey of the attitudes of students, teachers, and parents towards the use of English as a medium of instruction in Hong Kong secondary schools. Reportedly, while Hong Kong is to be taken over by the Chinese rule in July 1997, students and their parents consistently place English over Chinese as a teaching medium regardless of their agreement that teaching becomes more effective if Chinese-medium instructed.

The author notes that, as the use of mixed-code teaching in Hong Kong schools is prevalent, educators attempt to persuade the government that mixed-code is not only inevitable, but preferable in most Hong Kong schools. The author further points out that, though Chinese as the medium of instruction is gaining greater focus near the date for Hong Kong's takeover by China, English must be preserved.

Categorizing the perception of diploma students into a 4-factor patterns - Anxiety towards use of English, Generalized Motivation to English study, Self-Reinforcing Motivation to use of English, and Orientation to Chinese Language - the author proposes that a higher consistency takes place in students' language needs and preferences with dual-medium English and Cantonese instruction than with an all-English medium instruction.

In September 1998, the Education Department of the fledgling Hong Kong Special Administrative Region implemented a controversial medium-of-instruction policy which compelled around three-quarters of the territory's hitherto English-medium secondary schools to switch to Chinese-medium teaching in Forms 1–3 (years 7–9). Only 112 schools were permitted to remain English-medium, but only on the condition that their content-area teachers make consistent use of English as the language of classroom instruction and interaction rather than, as had been the case in the last two decades of colonial rule, a mixture of Cantonese and English. This article presents the findings of a study which sought to determine the extent to which the post-colonial government's language policy has been translated into classroom practice in the reformed Chinese and English streams since 1998. The findings were derived from a questionnaire survey of a sample of undergraduates from the first two cohorts to complete their studies in the reformed Chinese and English streams, together with semi-structured interviews with students and teachers currently studying and teaching in the two streams. The findings indicate that teachers in both the Chinese and English streams have found it difficult to fully implement the new policy in their classrooms.
[Copyright of Research Papers in Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02671520802172461]