Formal That's an interesting one, because Chinese literacy skills are acquired in a completely different way to western ones, their language is learnt via visual memorising of characters, and their reproduction, thousands of them, so even when they learn English they tend not to learn it phonically but via visual memory. It can be a real issue when they come to British Universities and have to apply their English skills in study at a high level. The good, most enlightened universities, have tailored programmes designed to equip them with phonological skills.
The standard of English teaching in Hong Kong schools is acknowledged by the government to be very weak and the NET (Native English Teaching) programme that was established to address the issue has been a fiasco with native English teachers given no proper support in terms of educational strategies for addressing the different nature of literacy skills in English and Chinese.