Will the new fine-tuning medium-of-instruction policy alleviate the threats of dominance of English-medium instruction in Hong Kong?

Will the new fine-tuning medium-of-instruction policy alleviate the threats of dominance of English-medium instruction in Hong Kong?

• Poon, Anita Y. Dept. of Education Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University

Current Issues in Language Planning, 14(1), 34-51, 2013

Philadelphia, United States

Routledge

2013

• F Learning & Teaching
  • FE Medium of Instruction, Language of Teaching, Bi-& Multilingual Education, Problems of Bilingualism, Code-mixing & Code-switching
• D Curriculum
  • DA Objectives & Outcomes
• D Curriculum
  • DE Secondary Education Programmes

Language Planning Language Policy English-Medium Instruction English Dominance

• Hong Kong

• 1997.7 onwards

• Secondary Education

Medium of instruction (MOI) is a highly controversial and thorny educational issue in Hong Kong. Despite the Hong Kong government's strenuous efforts to promote Chinese-medium instruction since 1984, social and community pressure for English-medium instruction (EMI) has been immense and continues to increase. However, the dominance of English as MOI has raised various educational, linguistic, and socioeconomic issues such as rote learning, motivation, declining language standards, and restricted social mobility. Against this background, this article examines the potential of the recently introduced fine-tuning of MOI policy in addressing such concerns and ensuring the benefits of EMI. The article draws on language-planning theories and various concepts of bilingual education for framing the argument and relies on government statistics, empirical studies, and newspaper and magazine articles as sources of data. It is concluded that a policy approach is not sufficient to treat language problems, and that MOI should be planned holistically together with language teaching in the entire school curriculum.
[Copyright of Current Issues In Language Planning is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14664208.2013.791223]

Contains 7 notes

• English

Journal Articles

• 14664208

• 10.1080/14664208.2013.791223

https://bibliography.lib.eduhk.hk/bibs/bb80e6ae

2014-05-29