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The 2010/2011 academic year marked an important turning point in the development of Hong Kong's medium-of-instruction (MOI) policy as it offered secondary schools greater autonomy in determining their MOI policy. This paper examines the implementation of the new fine-tuning MOI policy in a representative secondary school. It compares its school-based language policy with students' (Years 7, 8 and 10) self-reported data about their actual use of English over a five-day week. At the junior secondary level (Years 7 and 8), the findings indicate a close alignment of policy and practice only in the English-medium subjects, whereas in some other subjects, the proportion of use of English could not be clearly determined due largely to the complexity of the school-based policy and teachers' flexibility and autonomy in practice. Furthermore, it is revealed that a highly sophisticated language-using situation at the senior secondary level (Year 10) poses potential challenges for the transition of students graduating from the junior level. The paper concludes by suggesting that a likely outcome of this newly implemented policy will be a return to the colonial government's laissez-faire policy in the 1980s and 1990s, where there was virtually no monitoring of policy implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the findings of a large-scale empirical study of the use of English by Chinese professionals in post-1997 Hong Kong. The study used three data collection methods: a questionnaire survey of 1475 professionals working at different levels in five key occupational fields in the public and private sectors, focus-group discussions, and case studies. The findings indicate that writing and (particularly) reading in English play an important role in the subjects' professional lives. The documents which the subjects read and write most frequently in English are emails, faxes, memos and letters. By contrast, spoken English apparently plays a more limited (though not unimportant) role in the professional workplace in Hong Kong. The evidence suggests that professionals in the fields of Engineering, Construction/Real Estate and Manufacturing have a greater need to communicate in English for various purposes than their counterparts in Business Services and Community/Social Services. Finally, it would appear that the higher a Hong Kong Chinese professional rises in his/her field, the more likely he/she is to have to use English: those subjects occupying senior ranks were found to read, write, speak and listen in English more than those in junior and middle-ranking positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]