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This paper investigates the development of academic language proficiency through immersion in middle school programmes in Hong Kong and Xi'an. The study reveals that in both contexts students have exposure to complex academic language through teacher talk and textbooks; however, there is not sufficient support for students' academic language use in writing. The paper discusses the possible causes and suggests how students can be helped to develop better academic language proficiency in these immersion contexts. (Contains 2 notes, 7 extracts, and 8 tables.)

This article reports a study of aspects of pedagogy that can bring about students' cognitive engagement with academic content and, thus, use of the academic language in content-based language lessons in three middle schools in Xi'an, China. Two criteria--academic content level and depth of processing--were used to determine cognitive content engagement by students. A detailed analysis of three lessons taught by the same teacher is presented in this article. These are selected to highlight the differences between teaching that facilitated engagement and the use of the academic language and teaching that failed to do so. The analysis shows that engagement seemed to occur when the teacher focused the content on challenging technical academic knowledge and helped students explore this content in depth. She focused on relationships between meanings rather than facts in isolation and demanded the processing of knowledge in different ways, which created the space for the use of academic language. She structured her lessons in a cyclical manner and exploited the feedback moves in the predominantly initiation-response-feedback (IRF) classroom interaction pattern to facilitate deep processing. She also had clear content and language learning objectives. (Contains 3 tables and 1 note.)

This paper reports a study of how context influences a content-based language teaching (CBLT) project in China, an approach which is fairly new in the country, in its implementation in three middle schools. It identifies three aspects of the context which have a crucial effect on classroom practice. These are the perceptions of the project and its objectives, as seen by the school principals, the parents and the teachers, who are stakeholders in the project; the curriculum content and resources; and the selection and development of the teachers. Following a discussion of these factors, the paper describes and discusses one CBLT lesson from the project. It shows how the opportunities and constraints imposed by these aspects of the context interact to bring about a mode of implementation that may be seen as unsatisfactory from a CBLT lesson perspective. It argues, however, that the implementation may be more appropriately seen in contrast to mainstream English lessons and, as such, is a legitimate and worthwhile response to the context within which the approach is implemented. (Contains 1 table.)