This study examines how the language used at home, Putonghua or Cantonese, has influenced the Chinese reading attainment of 4335 primary school students in Hong Kong. Also examined was the influence of the birthplace and home background socioeconomic status (SES) of the reader. Although the indigenous Hong Kong population uses Cantonese, a dialect of Chinese, for everyday communications, the Chinese written in school is Modern Standard Written Chinese (MSWC), the written equivalent of Putonghua, the spoken language of the people of China. Many of the numerous families migrating from China to Hong Kong in recent years have brought with them children educated in Putonghua in China and with extensive experience of MSWC. It was hypothesised that the reading attainment of these students would be superior to that of classmates born in Hong Kong and using Cantonese habitually. This would apply particularly to students from advantaged SES homes. The children born in China indeed had superior reading attainment. But children speaking Cantonese at home and Putonghua 'sometimes' had the highest reading scores, regardless of their birthplace or SES. The writers reflect on assumptions about the influence of the language used at home on language attainment and the implications for educational planning.
[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/10.2167/jmmd529.1 ]

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]