In September 1998, the Education Department of the fledgling Hong Kong Special Administrative Region implemented a controversial medium-of-instruction policy which compelled around three-quarters of the territory's hitherto English-medium secondary schools to switch to Chinese-medium teaching in Forms 1–3 (years 7–9). Only 112 schools were permitted to remain English-medium, but only on the condition that their content-area teachers make consistent use of English as the language of classroom instruction and interaction rather than, as had been the case in the last two decades of colonial rule, a mixture of Cantonese and English. This article presents the findings of a study which sought to determine the extent to which the post-colonial government's language policy has been translated into classroom practice in the reformed Chinese and English streams since 1998. The findings were derived from a questionnaire survey of a sample of undergraduates from the first two cohorts to complete their studies in the reformed Chinese and English streams, together with semi-structured interviews with students and teachers currently studying and teaching in the two streams. The findings indicate that teachers in both the Chinese and English streams have found it difficult to fully implement the new policy in their classrooms.
[Copyright of Research Papers in Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02671520802172461]

After the resumption of sovereignty in 1997 mother tongue education in Hong Kong, though it began with the good intention of national reintegration, politi-cally, socially, culturally and educationally, has escalated the tensions and contradic-tions of the politics of bilingualism in its implementation. The government policy of bi-literacy and trilingualism addresses, rather than resolves, the problems of hegemonic struggle among different social groups in the society, and between the indigenous elite class and national ruling elites at both the local and national level. A reproduction analysis is conducted to examine the events pertinent to the language shift of English as a medium of instruction (EMI) to Chinese as a medium of instruction (CMI), with particular emphasis on controversial issues such as parental choice, antagonism of elite classes, and group politics in the face of the internationalisation of English under globalised developments of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). English, a colonising language in the past and now a world language for changes in ICT, remains problematic for Hong Kong's language policy undergoing decolonisation and internationalisation in its early post-transitional years. Putonghua, the national lan-guage of China, challenging Cantonese, the regional dialect, as the formal and high Chinese language of the society, has added complexities to the discourse of polemical mother tongue education under the 'one country, two systems' framework practised in Hong Kong.
[Copyright of Compare: A Journal of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0305792032000107786]

This article examines colonial language policies and practices at the government Central School, Hong Kong - the so-called Eton of the East - in the second half of the nineteenth century. The article, which draws on a range of unpublished primary sources, seeks to enhance our knowledge of an important episode in Hong Kong's educational history and, in so doing, illuminate our understanding of British attitudes towards the learning and use of English in the empire. The article is divided into three main sections. The first section analyses the nature and purposes of the scheme to 'centralise' government-sponsored English teaching in a flagship school in the early 1860s. The second section investigates the roles of the English and Chinese languages in the colonial curriculum and the approaches to the teaching of English adopted by the school's founding Headmaster, Frederick Stewart. The final section examines the reform of the Central School in the late nineteenth century.
[Copyright of Language and Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/le744.0]

This article examines the attitudes of the colonial and metropolitan governments towards the promotion of English-language education on Hong Kong Island between 1842 and 1860. The study, which draws on a range of unpublished primary sources, was conducted in response to Whitehead's recent call for detailed case studies of colonial education policies. This article explores, within the context of Hong Kong, a centrally important aspect of education in the Empire, and one that has been the subject of surprisingly little archival research: British policies towards the teaching and learning of English as a second language. The article begins by analysing the political, economic and demographic forces that influenced the study and use of English in Hong Kong during the 1840s and 1850s, and then moves on to examine language policies and practices in the colony's mission schools, with a particular focus on the Morrison Education Society School, the first Western school to be established on the Island after the British occupation. The final section analyses the introduction of English teaching in the government vernacular schools in the early 1850s.
[Copyright of History of Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00467600600745395]

In September 1998, Hong Kong's Education Department introduced the first stage of a controversial language policy which, when fully implemented, will bring about a fundamental change in the roles of the English and Chinese languages in the territory's education system at secondary level. The new policy, which was announced shortly after the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong from Britain to China in 1997, stipulates that the majority (around 300) of the territory's English-medium schools should adopt Chinese as the medium of instruction (MOI). Only 114 schools have been allowed to 'continue' teaching in English. In the community-wide debate which followed the announcement of the policy, reference was frequently made in the media to the fact that the select group of English schools would 'retain' English as the MOI, while those English schools which failed to receive permission to 'continue' using English would be forced to 'switch' from English to Chinese. This paper, which examines the language of oral communication in the English-medium stream prior to the introduction of the new policy, assesses the changes which teachers and students in the English schools and former English (i.e. now Chinese) schools will need to make in order to implement the new policy.
[Copyright of Research Papers in Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02671520110084030]

The use of students' second language as the medium of instruction in schools is quite common in former colonies of Western countries. Schools in Hong Kong have had this kind of experience for more than 150 years. In this study, three factors, namely economic, political, and educational, are found to affect the choice of medium of instruction in schools. In particular, the economic factor is found to be the dominant one for most of the time, while the educational factor has the smallest influence. Due to the change of the above three factors and their interactions over time, there were more Chinese-medium secondary schools in the first 100 years (1842-1949) and then more English-medium secondary schools during the transitional period 1950-97. However, the political factor suddenly becomes dominant after the change of sovereignty--there is an abrupt drop in English-medium secondary schools after government intervention in 1998. Educators should be more vocal and involved in politics in order to push the Government to make decisions that are educationally right.
[Copyright of Language and Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500780408666891]

In September 1997, shortly after China resumed sovereignty over Hong Kong, the Education Department announced a policy which was widely seen as a restoration of 'mother-tongue education', but which, in reality, was an elitist language selection policy. This policy, which provided for the selection of the best primary school graduates for monolingual education in English, was designed to be a cost-effective way of training in English skills for those who had the economic and cultural capital to benefit from it. Meanwhile, the majority of students were barred from sufficient exposure to English, the language of power and wealth. In this paper, I shall show that this policy draws on a strong utilitarian discourse about the centrality of English for the economic survival of Hong Kong, which was engineered by business interests on the eve of the changeover in 1997, and which helped perpetuate a form of linguistic imperialism. Meanwhile, academics whose research was used to legitimize the policy, failed to problematize dominant language ideologies that have been used to justify pedagogically unsound practices and an inequitable language streaming policy. Through documenting the voices of individual educators, I am able to delineate counter-discourses which, albeit weak and isolated, nevertheless manifested much broader educational concerns than the narrow utilitarianism and the unquestioned privileging of the learning of English skills that underlay the current policy.
[Copyright of Journal of Education Policy is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0268093032000145917]