Empirical studies on university choice and access among under-represented racial/ethnic minorities have utilised the concept of school-based social capital (SBSC)–defined by Stanton-Salazar as key resources and support provided by institutional agents (i.e. teachers, counsellors and other staff). They primarily relied upon minority students’ perceptions. Few of them canvassed both staff and student understandings and experiences of SBSC and thus have not yet captured the nature of SBSC and its influence from both the supply and demand sides. This study interviewed 18 secondary school teachers and nine minority students of South/Southeast Asian ethnicity enrolled in a publicly-funded school of Hong Kong. Its findings shed light on the highly-valued school-based support and resources staff and students viewed as helpful in the university choice process. The findings also disclosed the challenges minority students expressed about being exposed to SBSC while living in the school community, characterised by an ethos of “treating everybody the same”. This in turn rationalised staff understanding of diversity and equity-based support as a transitional approach to mainstreaming/assimilating minority students. As a result, some staff members either withheld critical information on university admission requirements or were less responsive towards the needs of the most disadvantaged minority students, despite a presumable promise to envision university for all. This study calls for structural and institutional transformation so that both individual and collective efforts can empower the least advantaged and promote their university choice and access. Copyright © 2023 Educational Review.

With an increasing number of students of ethnic minority in the Education University of Hong Kong, a new Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for learning spoken Cantonese was designed in 2020 and was completed in 2022. The platform aimed at providing additional support to Non-Chinese Speaking (NCS) students. The researchers were the principal project leaders. An exploratory study was conducted to examine the challenges encountered and the solutions implemented. It was comprised of three parts: a self-reflective study, a questionnaire survey and an in-depth individual interview. It was found that there were five main challenges: learners’ difficulty in learning Cantonese as a tonal language (Chan & Li, 2000), a diversity of their ethnicities, a wide gap of learning differences, a low level of motivation, and finally a limited budget and labour for the creation of the MOOC (Barak et al., 2016). To address those issues, a bundle of solutions was implemented. Topics and learning objects were plotted on a scale of difficulty. After students had practiced pronunciation of items ranging from mono-syllabic words to poly-syllabic words or phrases, they had to practise multi-levelled tasks in different real-life situational contexts. Motivation was enhanced by the use of visuals, audios, learning videos and a scoring mechanism incorporated in the platform. During the production of the learning videos, students also played the roles of characters and hence provided them with more guided and authentic learning experiences. It was concluded that those methods were mostly effective in addressing the challenges. Copyright © 2023 ACCS.

Despite national policies, de facto school segregation for racial/ethnic minority students in the West and East has continued to deepen. In Hong Kong, the segregated school system was abolished in 2013, while from 2004 reformed School Places Allocation Systems encouraged minority students to choose mainstream primary and secondary schools. However, de facto ethnicity-based school segregation continues to prevail. Most minority students in the mainstream system are stuck in low-status schools where they face discrimination and institutional exclusion. This has led many of them to retreat to a limited number of schools that have traditionally catered for minority communities. Such segregation calls forth scholarly attention to the paradoxical correlation between the physical mixing of diverse students and equality of educational opportunity, especially equal access to post-secondary education (PSE)—a key for minority youth to function in the competitive labour market. This study employed the theory of school-based social capital (SBSC) and compared the ways in which PSE-relevant institutional resources and support were rationalised and enacted by staff in de facto segregated and desegregated school contexts. Case studies of two secondary schools lead us to argue that desegregation is only effective when institutional structure, culture and agents empower minority students through access to instrumental resources and support for the pursuit of PSE. The findings confound the desegregation policy and call for structural/institutional interventions to ensure instrumental SBSC is accessible to PSE-bound minority students in all schools, and thus increase the effectiveness of school desegregation. Copyright © 2023 British Educational Research Association.

In Hong Kong, around 33,000 non-Chinese speaking ethnic minority (NCS-EM) students were studying in local schools in 2019-2020, and nearly 40% were kindergarten children. However, from 2015 to 2019, the percentage of NCS-EM students admitted to government-funded postsecondary programmes remained 10% lower than that of the overall student population (Legislative Council Secretariat, 2020). Many NCS-EM students have experienced challenges in school adaptation because of difficulties with Chinese language. Studies on NCS-EM children’s problems in Chinese learning revealed that insufficient exposure to Chinese language in children’s daily living made them lag behind their Chinese-speaking peers (Oxfam et al., 2019). Even though some of them were locally born, their Chinese language proficiency, especially in recognizing Chinese characters and writing Chinese characters, remained a concern (Legislative Council Secretariat, 2018; Oxfam et al., 2019). This paper suggests immersing cultural responsiveness in support of NCS-EM children in learning Chinese language and social-emotional skills. The focus will be on teacher professional development, curriculum planning, and learning and teaching. Practical suggestions derived from a five-year Hong Kong based ‘C-for-Chinese@JC’ Project, which underscores the use of culturally responsive education benchmarks in kindergartens, are given. Guidelines for providing support to NCS-EM children for building up a learning environment with equity will be proposed. Copyright © 2023 ACEID.

Objective: This research focused on the psychosocial influences that account for differences in academic achievement and motivation among ethnic minority and ethnic majority students in Hong Kong. Methods: A cross-sectional correlation was conducted on 154 students in total. Specifically, 86 ethnic minority students and 68 local Chinese students. Researchers assessed students’ ethnic identity, academic self-concept, perceived parental expectations, ethnic/ideal self-discrepancies, actual/ideal self-discrepancies, ethnic group, academic achievement and academic motivation. Results: A significant t-test indicated greater ethnic identity in the ethnic minority group. A moderated mediation model suggested that ethnic/ideal self-discrepancies predicted a negative correlation with academic motivation through the mediation of actual/ideal self-discrepancies; a stronger effect was shown in ethnic minority students. A significant mediation of academic self-concept was found between perceived parental expectations and academic outcomes. Moderated mediations revealed that ethnic identity produced a positive correlation with academic motivation in students between ethnic groups; a stronger effect was shown in ethnic majority students. Implications: Implementation of growth mindset interventions, frequent parent communication, heritage language classes and teachers of same ethnic origin in educational institutions are recommended. Conclusion: Ethnic identity, ethnic/ideal self-discrepancies and perceived parental expectations are notable psychosocial factors to consider in the academic outcomes of all students and especially those of ethnic minority descent. All rights reserved.

香港的中文作為第二語言教學的課程，除了由大專院校開辦的對外漢語課程及國際學校提供的中文課程外，還有近年備受關注的面向非華語學生（Non-Chinese Speaking Students）的中文課程。本文旨在評介香港非華語學生中文課程的實施狀況及其特色，通過對有關文獻及統計資料的考查與分析，探討當中的教學困境與對策。研究針對目前非華語學生中文教學在課程、評估及師資方面的不足展開論述，建議當局考慮從以下三方面加以改善：一、改革課程設置，重新審視對非華語學生的語文教育政策，積極考慮另設一個適應非華語學生學習需求的中文課程，與本地華裔學生的中文課程雙軌並行；二、優化評估機制，建立適用於香港本地的中文作為第二語言能力的評核基準，客觀反映非華語學生的中文學習進度和能力水平；三、加強校本支援及師資培訓，針對目前非華語學生中文教材不足、教師工作量大的情況，增撥資源加強校本專業支援，並與大學及研究機構合作，提供合適的教師培訓及開發教材資源等，以改善目前的教學困境，提升教學成果。In Hong Kong, there are mainly three kinds of curriculum in the field of teaching Chinese as a second language (TCSL), namely the Mandarin Chinese courses run by the tertiary institutions, Chinese curriculum offered by international schools, and the Chinese curriculum for the Non-Chinese Speaking (NCS) students. Through the analysis of documentary materials and statistical data, this paper aims at giving an overview of and discussion on the historical background and development of Chinese curriculum for the NCS students, as well as to investigate the challenge and measures followed by its implementation. It reveals that there is still inadequacy of the on-going curriculum implementation process in the aspect of curriculum planning, assessment system and teacher’s training. The research proposes that the government should consider making improvement in the following ways: firstly, the government should have a review on the language education policy for the NCS students, re-consider to plan an independent Chinese curriculum which tailors to students’ specific learning needs; secondly, modification of the assessment system should be made, a new Chinese language proficiency test system designed for the NCS students is required in order to assess students’ learning progress and the actual level they have attained; thirdly, measures should be taken to give professional support for school teachers, encourage teachers to design NCS Chinese curriculum together with educational experts from tertiary institutions, hoping to reduce teacher’s workload

This paper reports a case study of teaching Cantonese to Hong Kong ethnic minority pre-schoolers using process drama. Based on Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts of minor literature and language, becoming and de-/re-territorialisation, this paper aims to reconceptualise a playful adaptation of process drama developed by Joe Winston (Citation2012) as a language-minoritising approach to the teaching and learning of a major language that is very foreign to children. The findings suggest that, to accomplish ethnic minority children’s becoming Cantonese speakers, the theatre games and language play should involve minoritorisation and de-/re-territorialisation of the normative practices of process drama, the target language as well as learner identity. Copyright © 2023 Pedagogy, Culture & Society.

For the past two decades, a significant number of ethnic minority students from diverse racial, cultural, linguistic, and religious backgrounds have entered Chinese language classrooms in Hong Kong for the first time. Simultaneously, Chinese language teachers have come under criticism for their lack of understanding of diversity and their failure to integrate ethnic minority students academically and socially. However, there is little research on how these teachers can transform their educational beliefs, teaching techniques, and attitudes toward diversity and inclusion to respond effectively to the drastic changes taking place in their professional work. This study examines how a group of Chinese language teachers employed translanguaging as a social justice strategy to address the challenges of teaching minority students in a monolingual and assimilative educational setting in Hong Kong. Classroom observations show that teachers enacted a translanguaging stance, using students' familiar semiotic resources to make their teaching more inclusive and equitable for ethnic minority students from low socioeconomic and religious backgrounds. Teachers reported becoming more aware of diversity in the classroom as well as of the social inequalities and racial discrimination outside of school. The study shows that criticism has been unfairly levied on Chinese language teachers in Hong Kong, who should not be held responsible for the social problems hindering ethnic minorities' social mobility. Research should include a decolonial perspective to legitimize translanguaging as a social justice strategy for more transformative praxis in the education sector in postcolonial Hong Kong. Copyright © 2022 Springer.