A week in the life of a 'finely tuned' secondary school in Hong Kong

A week in the life of a 'finely tuned' secondary school in Hong Kong

• Chan, Jim Y. H. Dept. of English, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 34(5), 411-430, 2013

Great Britain

Routledge

2013

• F Learning & Teaching
  • FE Medium of Instruction, Language of Teaching, Bi-& Multilingual Education, Problems of Bilingualism, Code-mixing & Code-switching

Policy Implementation Medium of Instruction Fine-tuning Policy Chinese English

• Hong Kong

• 1997.7 onwards

• Secondary Education

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.
[Copyright of Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2013.770518]

• English

Journal Articles

• 01434632

• 10.1080/01434632.2013.770518

https://bibliography.lib.eduhk.hk/en/bibs/7044f520

2014-05-29