After viewing the importance for children to access to English as a basic language right, the author proposes the establishment of a culturally compatible English curriculum that promotes both Cantonese and English.

The author reports that a research was conducted to examine how English lessons were organized in junior forms in secondary schools in Hong Kong in order to find out whether schools situated in different socioeconomic and sociocultural contexts provided their Cantonese-speaking students with differential access to the socioeconomically dominant English linguistic and cultural resources in Hong Kong.