Hong Kong students＇ approaches to learning： Cross-cultural comparisons

Anecdotal evidence abounds in Hong Kong to the effect that students entering tertiary education are predisposed to a ＂rote＂ learning approach. With the internalisation of higher education in many countries, there is still insufficient understanding of how Chinese students approach their learning. Except few studies were conducted locally, there have been no systematic studies undertaken and there is a tendency to rely on anecdotal statements about Hong Kong students＇ approaches to learning. This study was designed to see if Hong Kong Chinese students who enrolled into a 3-year undergraduate programme in occupational therapy predisposed to a surface or deep approach to learning react differently when moving progressively from one stage to the next stage in their curriculum. The study adopted a longitudinal design method and measured students＇ changes in their approaches to learning using the Biggs＇ Study Process Questionnaire （SPQ）. The internal consistency reliability estimates for SPQ scales for samples of Hong Kong, Australia and UK were compared. The results of this study indicated that Hong Kong Chinese students demonstrated a higher mean for the deep approach learning and a lower mean for the surface approach, similar to other Hong Kong studies conducted in other tertiary institutions in Hong Kong and Australia.     

CEPA and interrelationship between Chinese yuan and Hong Kong dollar

In order to explore the interrelated impacts of the economical communications between China and Hong Kong SAR, especially after the closer economic partnership arrangement (CEPA) and the Chinese yuan offshore financial business in Hong Kong banks in 2004, the exchange rates of the Chinese yuan and the Hong Kong dollar are investigated as well-performing market signals that should reflect this historical transformation. With vector autoregressive models (VAR), the Johansen cointegration test and the Granger causality test on the exchange rates of the Chinese yuan and the Hong Kong dollar adjusted by the consumer price index and inter-bank interest rates are examined. It is found that the exchange rates of the Chinese yuan and the Hong Kong dollar after CEPA are in long-term equilibrium and Granger causality with each other, which means that the interrelationship of the Chinese yuan and the Hong Kong dollar is more closely integrated after the implementation of the CEPA. In conclusion, the cooperation regarding bilateral trade and financial markets between China and Hong Kong SAR has been enhanced after 1997; furthermore, after the implementation of CEPA the interrelationship of the economies between China and Hong Kong SAR is significantly reinforced.     

Managing Chinese Catalogingat The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Library

This paper describes the experience and the observation of the author as a cataloger of Chinese publications at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Library. The trends in collection development of Chinese language materials in the Library have a crucial impact on Chinese cataloging. The way that Chinese cataloging has been haudled in this rapidly changing environment is reported here.     

亚洲大入侵

Opportunities in Hollywood for Chinese actors and directors have exploded recently. For the past, decade or so, mainstream American audiences have slowly been opening up to Chinese talent, particularly from Hong Kong cinema. Chow Yun-fat, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li have alt starred in Hollywood pictures, and directors such as Ang Lee and John Woo are known to movie fans everywhere.     

An Analysis on the Cultural Factors that Affect People’s Perceptions:A Case Study

The intention of this present paper is to explore the relationship between culture and perception and the cultural factors that affect people’s perceptions from different cultural backgrounds. This study is based on a case, which is a news report about the cultural conflict between an old Chinese father and her daughter who has been living in Canada for eight years. Detailed information has been acquired by the author using relative books, journals as well as her own understanding and interpretation. It is concluded that to be aware of the cultural factors is of great importance to understand why people from different cultures have quite different perceptions toward the same thing, which can help to reduce the conflicts and misunderstandings in intercultural communication.     

The Jixia Academy and the Birth of Higher Learning in China: A Comparison of Fourth-Century B.C. Chinese Education with Ancient Greece

This is a very timely book,as the international educational community becomes more and more aware of the shift in global geo-politics towards Asia,and the likelihood that Asian educational ideas and values will have a more direct and explicit influence on educational policy and cultures of learning and teaching in future.The high scores of East Asian students in TIMMS and PISA have already attracted considerable attention,but little is known of the deep underlying culture of learning and thought that goes back to the axial age and Kong Qiu,the Chinese philosopher who lived from 551 to 479 BC,and was introduced to 16th century Europe as Confucius or the Master Kong (Kong Fuzi).Most recently,China has launched a unique approach to cultural diplomacy in the establishment of hundreds of Confucius Institutes around the world,most as joint ventures between Chinese universities and school boards,universities and NGO's in more than 90 nations or regions.So far,most of these institutes have focused on the teaching of Chinese and the training of Chinese languages teachers,few have the capacity to introduce or explain the rich educational and philosophical heritage that is summed up in the term Confucianism.     

A Case Study of Language Policies in Hong Kong

Hong Kong belongs to China. However, Hong Kong has been a colony of the British Empire for 154 years and 11 months and it has been under Japan rule for three years and eight years. Hong Kong returned t...     

SARS(高二适用)

SARS is short for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which wecall in Chinese“非典型肺炎”.It has been apopular topic of conversation since the dis-ease began to spread on the Chinese main-land,in Hong Kong and Taiwan.The mainsymptoms(症状)of SARS are high fever,dry cough and breathing difficulties.     

完形填空

Customs are different 1 country to country.2 the differences in customs,mistakes and comic situations 3 occur sometimes.Here is just.4 of them.A young Englishwoman 5 was not familiar 6 the Chinese culture 7 to Hong Kong from Great Britain.One day she paid a 8 one of her Chinese     

The Hong Kong Chinese University Document Retrieval Database——The Hong Kong Newspaper Full-text Database Projeet

This project is to collect, organize, index and store full-text and graphics of selected Chinese and English newspapers currently published in Hang Kong. The end product will be an electronic database available to researchers through local area network, Internet and dial-up users. New items of the day before and up to six months will be available for online searching, via key word or subject, Earlier cumulated nateriats alone with the same indexing and searchmg software will be archived to optical media (CD ROM disks). As Itong Kong experiences rapid social, financial, conmtercial, political, educational and cultural changes, our state-of-the-art comprehensive coverage of local and regional newspapers will be a landmark contribution to information industries and researchers internationally. As the coverage of the database will be comprehensive and centralized, retrieval of news items of major Hang Kong newspapers will be fast and immtediate. Users do no need to look through daily or bi-monthly indexes in order to go to the newspapers or cuttings to obtain the hard copy, and then bring to the photocopier machine to copy,At this stage, we are hiring librarians, information specialists and support staff to work on this project. We also met and work with newspaper indexing and retrieval system developers in Beijing and Hang Kong to study cooperative systems to speed up the process. So far, we have received funding support from the Chinese University and the Hong Kong Government for two years. It is our plan to have a presentable sample database done by mid 1995, and have several newspapers indexed and stored in the structure arid for mat easy formigration to the eventual database system by the end of 1996.     

Hongkong＇s Problem of Drinking Water（高一适用）

Water has been one of Hong Kong‘s biggest problems. Sometimes they have too much rain and this causes a great deal of damage. At other time they have not enough. Once water taps could be used for only four hours every fourth day. For the rest of the time, there was no water. Some of the water they use comes from China but it is not enough. They have an average(平均的) rainfall of about 216cm and it is very important to use all of it. Unfortunately,     

Difference of Translation Subjectivity fro Two English Translation Version of Hong Lou Meng

Hong Lou Meng is one of the four greatest classical novels of China. Since the appearance of the book, more and more people have been interested in it and have begun to study the book from different point of views. Then a new subject-redology, namely the study of the book- comes out. Hong Lou Meng, as representing the peak of the development in the tranditional chinese realistic novels, has been translated into many languages. Nowdays, there are only two versions of the translation that consists of the whole 120 chapters of the book: one is entitled A Dream of Red Mansions translated by Yang Hsien-yi and his wife Gladys Yang; the one with the title The Story of the Stone is translated by David Hawkes and John Minford.From the view of culture, the book Hong Lou Meng is a great collection of chinese traditional culture, and it reflects the tradition, the religion, the festivals, the tea culture, and the medicine culture and as well as the opera and poem s of chines people. But viewing the translation versions, different people have different translations to the same culture elements. This paper, beginning from this point, makes a first study about the translatiuon subjectivity sense, that leads to this translation differences.     

A Cognitive Analysis of Love Metaphors in English and Chinese Songs

In the study of metaphor, as a branch of the general cognitive science, cognitive linguistics has been walking forward at all times. In recent years, attention has gradually been paid on the metaphor study in the Chinese academic circles, and some domestic scholars have carried out research one after another, mainly through some daily expression, poetry, prose or novel to analyze and demonstrate the similarities and differences of love metaphors in Chinese and western culture. The new exploration of the role of metaphor in poetry and the cognitive mechanism was included, and it gained some achievements. The innovation of this paper is that it breaks the confinition to everyday expression, literature, combing with classic and modern songs in English and Chinese, to compare the love metaphor in English and Chinese songs.     

A Tentative Refutation on the Language Arbitrariness From the Perspective of the Six Categories of Chinese Characters

It has long been viewed that Saussure’s principle of arbitrariness is a fundamental theory in modern linguistics.Up to now,some linguists and scholars have raised their doubts to Saussure’s arbitrariness theory from different aspects.In this thesis,the author aims at using " 六书 "(The six categories of Chinese characters) to show that the creation of Chinese characters has some reasons and it was not 100% arbitrary between the forms of linguistic signs and their meaning.     

On Positive Transfer of Native Language in the Foreign Language Teaching and Learning

Native language plays an important role in the field of foreign language teaching and learning. When it comes to the transfer of the native language, we always think about the negative interference of it, even if we know that language transfer can be divided into positive transfer and negative transfer. In fact, we should not neglect these common areas between Chinese and English, which lead to the positive transfer and strengthen the efficient process of language learning. Here, there have been listed four levels of common areas between Chinese and English to illustrate the positive transfer from Chinese to English.     

Anticancer effects of Chinese herbal medicine, science or myth？

Currently there is considerable interest among oncologists to find anticancer drugs in Chinese herbal medicine （CHM）. In the past, clinical data showed that some herbs possessed anticancer properties, but western scientists have doubted the scientific validity of CHM due to the lack of scientific evidence from their perspective. Recently there have been encouraging results, from a western perspective, in the cancer research field regarding the anticancer effects of CHM. Experiments showed that CHM played its anticancer role by inducing apoptosis and differentiation, enhancing the immune system, inhibiting angiogenesis, reversing multidrug resistance （MDR）, etc. Clinical trials demonstrated that CHM could improve survival, increase tumor response, improve quality of life, or reduce chemotherapy toxicity, although much remained to be determined regarding the objective effects of CHM in human in the context of clinical trials. Interestingly, both laboratory experiments and clinical trials have demonstrated that when combined with chemotherapy, CHM could raise the efficacy level and lower toxic reactions. These facts raised the feasibility of the combination of herbal medicines and chemotherapy, although much remained to be investigated in this area.     

Energy Performance and Condensation Risk of DCDV System in Subtropical Hong Kong简

The combined use of dry cooling （DC） system and dedicated ventilation （DV） system to decouple cool-ing and dehumidification process for energy efficiency was proposed for subtropical climates like Hong Kong. In this study, the energy performance and condensation risk of the use of DCDV system were examined by analyzing its ap-plication in a typical office building in Hong Kong. Through hour-by-hour simulation using actual equipment per-formance data and realistic building and system characteristics, it was found that with the use of DCDV system, the annual energy consumption could be reduced by 54%in comparison with the conventional system （constant air vol-ume with reheat system）. In respect of condensation risk, it was found that the annual frequency of occurrence of con-densation on DC coil was 35 h. Additional simulations were conducted to examine the influence of different parame-ters on the condensation risk of DCDV system. Measures to ensure condensate-free on DC coil were also discussed.     

A Contrastive Genre Analysis of English Abstract in Linguistic Journals Written by Chinese and English Writers

This paper contrastively studies the generic structures of sixty abstracts from English teaching and learning journals written by Chinese writers and English native writers.Analysis of the data is based on Swales’ IMRD(Introduction-Method-Result-Discussion) model and all the data are coded through SPSS.Result indicates 1) English natives tend to write longer than Chinese.2) The rhetorical structure of the abstract tends to be more complete in the international journals.3) English natives tend to write more about the background details while the Chinese natives focus more on the result explanation.It is hoped that this comparison would shed some lights on abstract writing for Chinese writers.     

Preserving the literary past, looking to the future： the first Hong Kong Literature Database

INTRODUCTION In the last two decades of the 20th century, there was an emerging interest in and emphasis on the study of Hong Kong literature among academic scholars. Since the first biennial conference “Conference on Taiwan and Hong Kong Literature (Tai Gang Wen Xue Xue Shu Tao Lun Hui)” held in 1982 in Mainland China, various conferences with diverse themes on Hong Kong literature have been held both locally and overseas in these twenty some years (Huang, 1988; Liu, 1997). The…     

Virtual Learn=ng Community as New Approach of Teacher Professional Development——Reflective Research into an eLearning Program of Intercultural Collaboration between China and UK

Among the current reform measures undertaken in Chinese K-12 education, to adopt New Curricula and to improve ICT application in teaching are both decisive, however, the lack of qualified trainers is handicapping the professional development of over 10 millions in-service teachers. One of eChina ～ UK projects in collaboration between universities from both sides is designed to develop virtual learning community （VLC） among in-service teachers and explore from pedagogic perspective how to conduct VLC. In accordance with reflective learning and collaborative learning, three online learning modules have been jointly created by Chinese and UK educational specialists, and one unit from each module has been piloted by a group of senior teachers. Through analyzing the processes of course design and pilot, supported by quantitative and qualitative research into the experiences of pilot participants, the paper identifies some core factors influencing the quality of VLC and suggests that more attention should be given to the interactive learning process within VLC rather than to create well-structured learning materials before hand. It has also analyzed VLC as a promising approach to support professional development of in-service teachers from the perspective of continuous improvement process. There is much to be researched into the approach of VLC.