The English and Chinese reading proficiency of 1376 Grade 4 students in 24 Hong Kong primary schools were assessed using measures developed for the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study. Students’ parents provided information about home reading activities (HRA) aimed at supporting their children’s reading prior to them entering school (“early home reading activities”, EHRA) and during Grade 4 (“home reading activities”). Results indicated that EHRA was a stronger predictor of reading performance in both Chinese and English than HRA. Moreover, ‘typical’ HRA such as reading books, telling stories and singing songs were found to be predictive of reading performance in both Chinese and English. In English, in addition, playing word games or character puzzles were also activities beneficial to reading performance. Together, these results provide evidence for the beneficial effects of traditional early childhood activities at home such as book reading, telling stories and singing songs for reading performance in later primary school in children’s first as well as second language.
This paper examines progress made in four schools in Hong Kong over a two-year period in providing for students with markedly different language backgrounds and competence learning Chinese in the same classrooms. It centres in particular on ways of delivering the curriculum to classes containing immigrant and local children, a growing issue in Hong Kong where the number of non-Chinese speaking school-age children has doubled since the year 2000. The Hong Kong Equal Opportunities Commission has expressed concern about the impact on the indigenous local students of steps taken to integrate their non-Chinese speaking immigrant peers into Hong Kong's schools. This paper considers a number of intervention strategies, including streaming by ability, grouping students according to their mother tongue, providing differentiated instructional materials and learning objectives and deploying resources specifically designed for linguistically disadvantaged students. Shortcomings in provision are discussed as well as problems faced by children who speak a "foreign" language in school and go home to environments in which only their mother tongue is spoken. Comment is directed at opportunities for nonChinese speaking students to learn their mother tongue in school and at steps taken by schools to engineer multicultural environments.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.