This study examines the association between teachers' preferred interpersonal behaviour in teaching and their thinking styles. A sample of 131 secondary teachers from Hong Kong (n = 94) and Macau (n = 37) participated in a survey to measure their preferred interpersonal behaviour by the questionnaire for teacher interaction (QTI) and their thinking styles by the thinking style inventory-revised (TSI-R). Results indicated that teachers in both regions preferred to employ student-centred interpersonal behaviour (leadership, helpful and friendly, understanding and freedom teaching styles) in the classroom teaching. Teachers' thinking styles were related to their preferred interpersonal teaching styles. Specific relationships were found between the types of thinking styles and their preferred teacher interpersonal behaviour among Hong Kong and Macau teachers.
[Copyright of Educational Psychology is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01443410.2010.548116]

Research conducted in the 1980s and 1990s pointed to a widening gap on Hong Kong university campuses between institutional language policy, which stipulated the use of English, and classroom practice, which often involved the use of Cantonese to explain and discuss English written materials. This article presents the findings of a multidimensional study which sought to uncover patterns of in-class and out-of-class language use at one officially English-medium institution between 2000 and 2010 and to identify the challenges that its mainly Cantonese-speaking undergraduates experience when listening to and speaking English for academic purposes. The findings were derived from two campus-wide questionnaire surveys and an interview-based longitudinal study of the student experience of English-medium higher education. The findings indicate that the gap between policy and practice has closed noticeably in the past decade in consequence of the increasing internationalisation of the student body and institutional initiatives to enforce the medium-of-instruction policy. While there is a closer, though not watertight, alignment between policy and practice in lectures and seminars, the evidence suggests that students have little need or desire to speak English outside the classroom, apart from situations in which international students or non-Cantonese-speaking students from mainland China are present.
[Copyright of Language and Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2011.553287]

This study investigated the identification and distribution of perfectionist types with a sample of 111 academically gifted Chinese students aged 17 to 20 in Hong Kong. Three approaches to classification were employed. Apart from the direct questioning approach, the rational approach and the clustering approach classified students using their scores on three constructs of the revised Almost Perfect Scale, which included high standards, order, and discrepancy between standards and performance. Despite the fact that the different approaches yielded different classification results, all three approaches generated profiles of three perfectionist types interpretable as nonperfectionists, healthy perfectionists, and unhealthy perfectionists, suggesting that healthy perfectionists tended to outnumber unhealthy perfectionists and nonperfectionists. Implications of the findings for working with perfectionist students and future research on perfectionism and perfectionist types are discussed.
[Copyright of Roeper Review is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02783191003587876]

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]