The mandatory use of mother tongue education in Hong Kong after 1997 met strong objections from the local community. While the government put forward a comprehensive educational agenda to justify the implementation of the policy, this paper raises the question of whether the change in language policy was mainly driven by an educational agenda, or whether there were other underlying agendas. To address the question, the history of the medium of instruction in Hong Kong is reviewed, and the experience of three decolonised Asian countries, Malaysia, Singapore and India, is discussed. The paper suggests that the political agenda has always played an important role in language policy formulation and implementation. In view of the important role that language plays in nation building and social reconstruction, it is inevitable that Chinese medium instruction will become more and more important. How the government will balance the need to strengthen the national identity of Hong Kong people and the need to maintain the international outlook and economic development of Hong Kong will have a major impact on the review of the new medium of instruction policy in 2001.
The effectiveness of instruction is a complicated phenomenon that involves a myriad of interrelated factors. Teacher- or student-centred approaches are only part of these diverse factors.
This study examined the contribution of the constructs of orthographic processing (orthographic choice and orthographic choice in context), syntactic processing (grammaticality and sentence integrity), and verbal working memory (two reading span indicators) to written Chinese composition (narration, explanation, and argumentation) in 129 fifteen-year-old L2 learners. A matrix task was also administered as a control task to tap cognitive flexibility. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis with written composition as a latent variable revealed orthographic processing and working memory as two significant, independent contributors, whereas the unique contribution of syntactic processing was not significant. Subsequent SEM analysis with narration, explanation, and argumentation as separate endogenous variables found varied patterns of the contribution of each latent predictor to written composition in different genres. These patterns are discussed in light of the importance of attention to learners' developmental stage and genre-sensitive measures to capture the psycholinguistic and cognitive underpinnings of written composition in L2 Chinese.
While Chinese character reading relies more on addressed phonology relative to alphabetic scripts, skilled Chinese readers also access sublexical phonological units during recognition of phonograms. However, sublexical orthography-to-phonology mapping has not been found among beginning second language (L2) Chinese learners. This study investigated character reading in more advanced Chinese learners whose native writing system is alphabetic. Phonological regularity and consistency were examined in behavioral responses and event-related potentials (ERPs) in lexical decision and delayed naming tasks. Participants were 18 native English speakers who acquired written Chinese after age 5 years and reached grade 4 Chinese reading level. Behaviorally, regular characters were named more accurately than irregular characters, but consistency had no effect. Similar to native Chinese readers, regularity effects emerged early with regular characters eliciting a greater N170 than irregular characters. Regular characters also elicited greater frontal P200 and smaller N400 than irregular characters in phonograms of low consistency. Additionally, regular-consistent characters and irregular-inconsistent characters had more negative amplitudes than irregular-consistent characters in the N400 and LPC time windows. The overall pattern of brain activities revealed distinct regularity and consistency effects in both tasks. Although orthographic neighbors are activated in character processing of L2 Chinese readers, the timing of their impact seems delayed compared with native Chinese readers. The time courses of regularity and consistency effects across ERP components suggest both assimilation and accommodation of the reading network in learning to read a typologically distinct second orthographic system. Keywords L2 Chinese reading . Phonological regularity . Phonological consistency . Event-related potential (ERP) . N170 . P200 . N400 . LPC Writing systems across the world vary fundamentally in the visual form of writing units and the mapping between orthographic and other linguistic units, including phonological units, grammatical morphemes, and semantic features. For instance, words in most alphabetic scripts are formed by linear arrangement of letters, while characters in Chinese, widely considered a morphosyllabic script (DeFrancis, 1989), are square-shaped consisting of components referred to as radicals. For mapping from orthography to phonology, the correspondence can be between graphemes and phonemes (e.g., English, French, and Korean hangul), between graphemes and consonants only (e.g., Hebrew), between a symbol and a mora in Japanese katakana and hiragana, or between a character and a syllable in Chinese. In today's globalized world, communicating in spoken and/or written form in two or more languages in different contexts on a daily basis is a way of life. The questions of how different scripts can be processed at relative ease by bilingual or multilingual speakers and how the characteristics of these systems may i...
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