Intercultural rhetoric has been studied in the context of second language writing for many decades. This article looks at the topic from a new perspective and offers an experimental study of the effects of intercultural rhetoric on reading comprehension. The experiment was set in Hong Kong, China, and assessed the reading comprehension (using a rational cloze design and quantitative and qualitative recall protocols) of 490 school students who were presented with four rhetorically different texts. Results suggest that the rhetoric of the students' first language (Chinese) had clear effects on reading comprehension.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02702710903054949]

There has been a growing concern that students in Hong Kong have low proficiency levels in English. Ths constitutes a challenge to language planning policy, which aims at providing opportunities for extending knowledge and experience through the acquisition of English grammar. Grammar forms a major component in English language teachng, and mostly has priority over other parts of the language. The acquisition of second language syntax is the focus of ths research. The main aim of the present study is to investigate the development of relative clauses in the interlanguage of native Cantonese learners of English within the framework of Keenan and Comrie's Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (1977, 1979). The study also seeks to distinguish the features of Cantonese-English interlanguage which may be attributed to language transfer from those which may be considered as universal to second language acquisition. The role of L1 is then examined. The study focuses on the theoretical concepts of language transfer, comparative study of Cantonese and English relative clauses as well as language universals from a typological perspective.
The issues are investigated with a database of syntactic judgements and production by a p u p of Cantonese-speaking students of English as a second language in Hong Kong. A number of features, namely, the use of resumptive pronouns, the retention of the head noun, shft of noun functions, nun-adjacency of .head noun and relative pronoun, preposition strandinddeletion, and avoidance of the use of zero relativizer are found in the data. These features are discussed and it is shown that they are more attributable to universal and developmental factors than to direct L1 transfer. One important finding of the study is that there exists an uncommon feature of retention of the head noun. Its presence is suggestive of lower proficiency levels in the target language.

This thesis reports the findings of a study which investigates the beliefs and classroom practices in grammar teaching of four ESL teachers in Hong Kong. A review of the literature is presented to show that while teacher cognition in formal instruction has attracted increasing research attention in recent years, a number of issues are not yet fully explored. In particular, relatively little has been written about teacher cognition in school settings where English is taught by non-native speaking teachers to large classes of students, who are in the classroom to learn the language simply because they are required to (Borg, 2003). This study aims to make a contribution by shedding light on this area of enquiry. It also aims to examine why teachers may hold conflicting beliefs, and how culture shapes the ways in which teachers think and act.
The four participants of this study are all Chinese teachers who teach English as a second language in Hong Kong secondary schools. Using case study methodology, the study involves indepth interviews with the teachers, classroom observations, audio recordings of the teachers' lessons, stimulated recall techniques, copies of materials used by the teachers, samples of student work, interviews with students, and metaphors generated by the teachers.
A key finding is that as the teachers have different professional training and teaching and learning experiences, they each espouse a unique system of beliefs. The teachers are not aware of all of their beliefs at the same time, and some beliefs may come to the fore of their awareness while others may recede into the background. This conceptualization of the "structure of awareness" helps to explain why some of the teachers in the study hold conflicting beliefs.
As the beliefs of the four teachers exhibit differences, their classroom practices also diverge. In terms of how they provide formal instruction, the four teachers can be placed on a continuum. Some teachers choose to

The English verb BE, with its complicated forms and multiple functions, has posed great learning difficulties for learners of English both as the first and a second language. Most previous studies on the acquisition of BE have only examined a small number of participants and used data from experimental tasks, which have failed to provide a full picture of how BE is acquired and used by learners. By adopting a corpus-based approach, this study presents a fuller picture of the forms and functions of BE in the interlanguage grammars of Chinese learners of English.
Two learner corpora were used in this research, namely, Hong Kong Baptist University Interlanguage Corpus (HKBUILC) and Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), consisting of English essays written by students from Hong Kong and Mainland China, respectively. Three subcorpora of CLEC (i.e. ST2, ST3, ST4) were adopted, representing Chinese learners at three different English proficiency levels. To obtain a comprehensive distribution of interlanguage BE, all the tokens of BE, including non-target-like, overgenerated BE, as in " Mary was lost the necklace she borrowed from her friend ", and omission of BE, as in "My mother would O angry with me", were annotated with respect to their syntactic and semantic properties. The data were then retrieved type by type for examination by using WordSmith, a concordancing software.
To account for the variable use of BE in learners' interlanguage grammars, this study further investigated a few factors that may influence the production and omission of BE, such as the following linguistic distinctions: (1) copular vs. auxiliary BE; (2) finite (am, is, are, was, were) vs. nonfinite (be, being, been) BE; (3) stage-level vs. individual-level predicate types (Carlson, 1977); (4) different post-BE constituents · · e.g. ergative vs. unergative verbs (Perlmutter, 1978); and (5) the differences between L1 and L2 (i.e. English BE vs. Mandarin Shi/Cantonese Haih).
The concordancing