This article examines the relation between social class and language attitudes through a triangulated study that analyses the attitudes of 836 secondary school students from different socioeconomic backgrounds toward the 3 official spoken languages used in postcolonial Hong Kong (HK; i.e., Cantonese, English, and Putonghua). The respondents were divided into 3 social class groups (viz. middle, lower-middle, and working class), according to their parents' occupations and levels of educational attainment. This particular group of students started its secondary school education when the mandatory Mother Tongue Education Policy was just implemented after China resumed sovereignty over HK. Data were collected through a questionnaire survey and focus-group interviews. This study was designed to test 2 hypotheses: (a) that the middle-class group would be the most positively inclined toward English and (b) that the working-class group would display the most positive attitudes toward Putonghua due to closer social distance. Although the results from the questionnaire survey appeared to provide a degree of support for both hypotheses, little evidence was found in the interview data to indicate that the working-class group did, in fact, aspire to Putonghua either as an alternative form of linguistic capital or a symbol of preferred social identity.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19313150903500945]

The mandatory use of mother tongue education in Hong Kong after 1997 met strong objections from the local community. While the government put forward a comprehensive educational agenda to justify the implementation of the policy, this paper raises the question of whether the change in language policy was mainly driven by an educational agenda, or whether there were other underlying agendas. To address the question, the history of the medium of instruction in Hong Kong is reviewed, and the experience of three decolonised Asian countries, Malaysia, Singapore and India, is discussed. The paper suggests that the political agenda has always played an important role in language policy formulation and implementation. In view of the important role that language plays in nation building and social reconstruction, it is inevitable that Chinese medium instruction will become more and more important. How the government will balance the need to strengthen the national identity of Hong Kong people and the need to maintain the international out look and economic development of Hong Kong will have a major impact on there view of the new medium of instruction policy in 2001.
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Despite the fact that Hong Kong is now a part of China, there are differences between Hong Kong and the main land, especially in terms of the education system, school environment, and learning culture,and learner proficiency level of English. Based on interviews with ten secondary school teachers, the paper discusses the difficulties caused by the recent influx of children from China into Hong Kong. Firstly, there are difficulties for the immigrants themselves. They have to search for a school that will accept the children, and the children are often rejected because their English is not good enough. Secondly, there are difficulties for the classroom teacher. Added to the problems of teaching through English,there are now additional problems with the Chinese children, such as different first languages and no single lingua franca. And there are difficulties for the schools, for example, caused by the lack of systematic admission procedures, and insufficient support for schools and teachers in this respect.The paper makes a number of observations and recommendations that may help to alleviate the situation.
[Copyright of Language, Culture and Curriculum is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07908319908666580]