Combining local, national and international languages – the last almost exclusively English in fact – is one of the most pressing issues facing educational professionals in today’s world. How and when can English be introduced to the school curriculum so that children still master literacy in local and national languages? Hong Kong’s language policy aims for its citizens to be trilingual in Cantonese, Putonghua and English and biliterate in Chinese and English. The current policy is that Cantonese should be the medium of instruction for all government primary schools, where English and Putonghua are taught as subjects. The majority of secondary schools are also Chinese medium, but about a quarter are English medium schools. Recently the government has signaled a possible controversial change in policy, as it has authorized a trial for ‘Chinese subjects’ to be taught through Putonghua in selected schools. At the same time ‘consumer’ demand for English is constantly heard. This paper will purpose a ‘multilingual’ solution to the medium of instruction policy. First, medium of instruction policies and practices in Hong Kong will be reviewed and then possible future developments will be considered. Finally, a way of combining the local language (Cantonese), the national language (Putonghua) and the international language (English) in the school curriculum will be proposed.
[Copyright © 2008 Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business.]

This paper aims to study the current challenges of Chinese language education in the multilingual societies of Hong Kong and Singapore through policy documents. After the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, the role of Putonghua is far more important than before due to political and economic reasons. However, the medium of instruction for the Chinese Language subject in Hong Kong has long been Cantonese since the British colony days. A change in the medium of instruction from mother-tongue Cantonese to Putonghua is a shift from L1 to L2. This paper will discuss the feasibility of this long term policy of Hong Kong Education Bureau with reference to Singapore’s experience. Currently, Singapore faces the problem of declining standard of reading and writing in Huayu (Putonghua in China) and this paper will investigate the reason for that and suggest possible remedies.
[Copyright © 2008 Canadian Center of Science and Education.]

This paper presents a two-year longitudinal study of a collaboration between four researcher-and-teacher pairs. The ultimate goal is to raise the quality of English language teaching in Hong Kong by first improving teacher understanding of language knowledge and language use and, then second, guiding teachers on how to adjust their English lesson planning accordingly. Methods used to evaluate the four teachers’ growth in understanding included comprehensive interviews at the beginning and end of the study, and stimulated recall interviews immediately following the teaching of the lesson. Findings indicate that teaching behaviours improved as a result of the collaboration. Areas of change included a deeper understanding of the concepts of language know-ledge and language use, a better balancing of language knowledge and use in lessons, a greater use of inductive teaching methodology, and a differentiated use of error correction according to the focus of the lesson – whether on language knowledge or language use. Factors contributing to change included the focus in discussions on pedagogical and content knowledge, as well as the collaborative, immediate and long-term reflective nature of intervention.
[Copyright © 2011 Centre for Language Studies, National University of Singapore. The article is available online at: http://e-flt.nus.edu.sg/v8n12011/wong.htm]

A comparison of the practices of native and non-native teachers of English-as-a-second-language writing in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, and Singapore based on a Questionnaire and follow-up interviews revealed a gap between teachers' ideal and actual practice, similar perceptions of the constraints preventing them from teaching according to their Preferred practice, and a general lack of training in process writing. Many of the teachers took a middle-of-the-road approach combining product and process teaching philosophies, with a somewhat more traditional approach taken by non-native speakers of English and those teaching in Asian countries. Those teaching in Australia were the most process-oriented in theory and practice, those teaching in Japan were the most product-oriented in theory and practice, while those teaching in the other countries of the survey showed a greater difference between theory and practice and more variation across individual teachers. The results can be interpreted to mean that the community of explanation (theory or ideal for practice) and the community of practice (actual practices) among teachers of English composition are not always well-aligned. While the rhetoric of process writing is generally the basis of the teachers' ideal or teaching philosophy, this rhetoric may mask a shallow commitment to the practices of process writing, and teachers may undermine the basis of process writing in attempting to selectively implement its tenets or to blend process and product elements in their teaching of writing. On the other hand, it may be that teachers of English in the Asia-Pacific region are developing a compromise teaching approach that combines process and product elements in a new synthesis.
[Copyright © 1997 Sage Publications.]

Despite a long history of publicly-funded English immersion education, late immersion in Hong Kong is not achieving the dual goals of content and second language learning at levels that an immersion curriculum can expect. The growing importance of English in the Asia Pacific region places an urgent demand on Hong Kong, and indeed its neighbouring cities and countries, to improve language-in-education policies and practices. To support the improvement of an aspect of practice within the late immersion curriculum, this paper offers a pedagogical framework for integrating content and second language teaching and learning to guide late immersion pedagogy. The proposed framework draws on three main sources of knowledge: first, the concepts of knowledge structures, text structures and language objectives; second, some of the teaching and learning problems observed in late immersion classrooms in Hong Kong; third, extensive experience of working with teachers who have attended an in-service immersion teacher education programme.
[Copyright © 2008 The Asian Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language.]

The Research Centre for Language Education and Acquisition in Multilingual Societies (RCLEAMS) is one of four Institute-level Research Centres at the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd). The principal aim of RCLEAMS is to study multilingual acquisition, language contact and the respective roles of different languages of education in contexts where the languages are not cognate (and where the scripts are often different), in order to be able to better understand the processes and issues involved and to inform governments and language policy-makers. Our particular focus is on Asian languages, including, of course, Chinese, and English. Further details about RCLEAMS, including our specific objectives and international partners, can be found at the website (www.ied.edu.hk/rcleams/). While RCLEAMS itself is relatively small, with only four full-time researchers, we conduct collaborative research with colleagues from the Institute itself, other universities in Hong Kong and with a number of international partners. There are also some thirty doctoral students in the field of language education who work closely with the Centre. We invite anyone who might be interested in working collaboratively with us to get in touch. This report will summarise current and recently completed research projects.
[Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011.]

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 secondaryschools in the first 100 years (1842-1949) and then more English-medium secondaryschools during the transitional period 1950-97. However, the political factor suddenlybecomes dominant after the change of sovereignty- there is an abrupt drop in English-medium secondaryschools 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 © 2004 Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business.]

This article explores the ideological complex in a Hong Kong primary school where a large number of immigrant mainland Chinese students study by examining the interview data from teachers and immigrant students. Drawing on the notions of monoglot ideology and misrecognition, this study indicates that disqualifications of some linguistic resources in the emergent repertoire of their students exist in the primary school as a political and social context dominated by particular language ideologies. This study also explores how the language ideologies of the students are constructed and how the students censor their use of the native language through internalisation of the language attitudes held by the teachers. The findings suggest that a flexible language ideology would help the students value their own language resources and construct a new identity in the new hibitus. It is also suggested that the immigrant students can employ the multilingual practices as a symbolic resource rather than as a disadvantage constructed by the institutional ideologies.
[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/10.1080/02671522.2014.970227]

This research explored the congruence and disparity between teachers' and students' attitudes towards French as a second language (L2) teaching strategies in a non-target language classroom context in the USA. The findings suggest students' and teachers' attitudes towards the direct and indirect teaching strategies were generally consistent, but not in terms of the collaborative teaching strategies. The findings also indicate that the beginner and elementary level students held different preferences for all the three teaching strategies. The underlying reasons could be learners' different language proficiency levels, and how well teachers execute these different teaching strategies in class. This study concludes with some implications for foreign language teacher education.
[Copyright of Journal of Education for Teaching is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02607476.2015.1044228]