The University of Hong Kong, an English medium of instruction (EMI) institution in the Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, has embarked upon an ambitious program designed to strengthen the university's international profile. In support of this aim, a recent review of language education at the university recommended that measures be adopted to encourage the use of English in all courses as well as in professional and social settings (University of Hong Kong, 2004). This study investigates the challenges and prospects for promoting the participation of undergraduate learners in classroom discussion at the university. An ethnographic approach is taken as the study explores the experiences of a group of eight Economics and Finance students and two English language teachers as they participated in oral interaction within their English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classroom. Data were collected throughout the entire EAP course via interviews, audiovisual recording of classroom discussions, classroom observation, documentary analysis, and questionnaires.
The study, grounded in Layder's (1993; 2006) theory of social domain analysis, adopts a multi-level investment perspective on participants involvement in classroom discussion. Learner and teacher investment in such discussion is therefore examined from various perspectives, including the individual, the interactional, and the institutional. The findings challenge previous research, which have portrayed Hong Kong learners as reticent to take part in classroom discussion. These conclusions lead to the development of a theoretical framework that reflects, from these different perspectives, the constraints and enablements to learner investment in oral interaction in the EAP classroom. It is argued that this framework has implications for promoting learner investment in classroom discourse beyond the language classroom. A series of pedagogical recommendations are proposed to promote investment in

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.

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