When Hong Kong was returned to the sovereignty of China by the British in July 1997, the new Hong Kong SAR (Special Administrative Region) Government announced the 'Biliterate and Trilingual' policy for all schools. Hong Kong students of this generation are expected to be proficient in both written English and Chinese, and speak fluent English (the international language), Cantonese (the vernacular language) as well as Putonghua (the national language of the PRC). To find out the attitudes of secondary school students towards these three languages, a questionnaire study was conducted with 134 senior secondary students. Given also the important relationship between social class, achievement and language attitudes (Schumann, 1976; Gibbons, 1984; Gardner, 1985; Siu, 1988; Lee, 1998), this paper compares the language attitudes of two main groups of Hong Kong students, namely the middle-class elite and the working-class low-achievers. The findings showed that the former group was more inclined to use English while the latter group the vernacular Cantonese. Despite this difference, both groups of students held generally positive attitudes towards the three languages.
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This paper examines the links between linguistic capital, cultural capital, linguistic imperialism and the use of English as the medium of instruction (MOI) in Hong Kong. It suggests that the notion of linguistic imperialism in Hong Kong, whilst useful for analysing practices in the early days of the colonial period, is superseded by the notion of linguistic capital, though neither presents a complete analysis of the MOI issue in Hong Kong. The paper suggests that a new version of linguistic imperialism in Hong Kong may be evidenced in examining the rise of Chinese-medium education and the spread of Putonghua in Hong Kong schools.
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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 ]