One major impact of globalisation on education is denoted by the growing trend to use English, the global language, as a medium of instruction (MOI) in emerging polities that are trying to enhance their English-speaking capacities. This article emphasises developing an understanding of MOI from a language policy and planning as well as an educational perspective. It explores the policy and practice of MOI in 10 polities in Asia including Bangladesh, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Maldives, Nepal, Timor-Leste and Vietnam, using a broad-based framework that aims to explicate the context, motivation, goals, actors, implementation process and outcomes of MOI. The article points out the dominance of English as MOI which is used in eight of the polity studies included in the analysis. It concludes that while the Asian region as a whole reflects the globalisation of English as medium of instruction policies, individual polities may have specific motivations and goals and that they may develop specific strategies to protect their own interests and identities. More crucially, at the macro-policy level, there seems to be a simplistic understanding of MOI as a cheap solution to complex language problems for achieving overly ambitious politico-economic goals and that this leads to less than ideal MOI implementation illustrated by teachers' and students' struggles as policy actors at the micro level.
[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/10.1080/14664208.2013.792130]

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]

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]

Since 1997, the 'biliterate and trilingual' policy has been adopted by the Hong Kong government, and is now guiding the curriculum design in Hong Kong primary schools. This language policy aims to ensure that Hong Kong students become biliterate (written English and Chinese) and trilingual (spoken English, Cantonese and Putonghua). However, Hong Kong primary schools currently do not have an agreed method for the implementation of trilingual education. As a preliminary step in the investigation of methods of the implementation of trilingual education in Hong Kong primary schools, we carried out a detailed case study of the trilingual education model adopted in a primary school. Views of key stakeholders (the principal, teachers, students and parents), on how successful the model is, were collected, and a number of lessons taught using English, Cantonese or Putonghua as the medium of instruction were recorded and analysed. On the basis of the research findings, a possible model for implementing trilingual education in Hong Kong primary schools has been suggested.
[Copyright of International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2012.689479]