The background of this paper is the development of field experience in the new Certificated in Secondary Education Course of the Hong Kong Institute of Education. As will be shown, this aims to introduce student teachers to schools and classroom teaching in a gradual and progressive manner. The focus of the paper will be the implementation of the second phase of the field experience – the Supporting Teaching Practice. This involved 199 students from the Chinese Stream and 6.05B student teachers from the English stream being placed in 56 schools. The Supporting Teaching Practice took place in a four-week period in March and April, 1995. The three levels of support which characterize this part of the programme – support from peers, support form teachers and support from Institute supervisor – are examined. As the development of team work is the most innovative aspect of the Supported Teaching Practice, this is examined in detail in terms of its implementation, operation and effectiveness. The general conclusion are that collaborative support from peers was very well received by the students themselves and is acceptable to the placement schools. Its operation in terms of joint post-lesson planning, peer observation and team teaching followed by joint-lesson reflection has been demonstrated to be a powerful tool for promoting reflective hypothesis formation about the teaching-learning process and it enables testing and evaluation of these by emerging teachers.

This paper outlines the changes in English medium of instruction policy in Hong Kong secondary schools since it became a specially administered region of China on 1st July, 1997. It gives a brief description of the background to the present situation, outlining the special place of English in Hong Kong schools and the reasons for the failure of policy initiatives in the past. The rationale for the present policy changes is critically discussed as are reasons for the resistance to change in certain Hong Kong schools as expressed by the school principals, the staff, parents and pupils. The paper concludes by examining the success of the present policy initiatives and examines the future of English medium education in Hong Kong schools.

This paper examines how Hong Kong has developed from a diglossic society, where the relationship between English and Chinese were largely in complementary distribution to each other, into a bilingual society, where there is a proliferation of mixed codes, involving a continuum of language use from “high” Cantonese and English to “low” Cantonese with code switching. Against this background, the Government’s recently promulgated mandatory language policy on the medium of instruction in secondary schools is examined. Though the obvious purpose of this policy is to improve the credibility and prestige of mother tongue education, it has the effect of creating a set of elite monolingual English medium schools. Whether these will be able to fully serve the needs of a bilingual society is discussed, especially as Putonghua and High Cantonese are increasingly used in the domains of government and higher education, and a variety of mixed codes and modes used in other social and domestic domains. The paper concludes with a preliminary examination into possible directions in research into the development of a bilingual teaching code, which is genre and domain sensitive and responsive to student needs.
[Copyright © 2000 International Association for Intercultural Communication Studies.]