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

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.

Two hundred and ninety-six English majors at universities in Poland, Austria and Hong Kong were given a 50-item questionnaire designed to evaluate their knowledge of grammatical terminology. The main aim was to identify whether the three populations were subject to differing 'terminological cultures'. This was found to be substantially the case; for example, the term indefinite article was known by 95% of Polish students but only 29% of the Hong Kong ones, whereas imperative was known by 71% of the Austrians but only 5% of the Hong Kongers. Some differences were attributed to a lack of use of the related concept in teaching; others were explained by the use of a synonymous term (e.g. reported speech was preferred in Poland and Hong Kong but indirect speech in Austria). A significant correlation between terminological knowledge and language proficiency was found for the Hong Kong students. Qualitative findings included confusion between pairs of complementary terms and thosewith similar forms; unknown terms being treated as transparent with functional reference where possible; and the prototypical use ofwords as examples of grammatical categories (e.g. 'beautiful' for adjective). Implications for teachers, writers and researchers are discussed.
[Copyright of Language Awareness is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658410802513751]