This article presents an overview of language policy in Hong Kong education during the colonial and post-colonial periods. The article is divided into three main sections. The first section outlines the sociolinguistic background of Hong Kong, including the demographic trends that have been crucial in determining the course of educational development in the city in the past 170 years. The second section offers an overview of language policies and practices during the colonial era (1842-1997). This section is divided into the two distinct phases which characterised education under the British; namely, (1) the period between the 1840s and the 1960s, during which English-medium secondary education was the preserve of the elite in society, and (2) the years between the 1970s and 1997, during which the majority of students in each age cohort attended schools in which English was the official medium of instruction. The third section examines developments in language policy since the handover, focusing on the promotion and subsequent fine-tuning of a controversial policy to promote Chinese-medium instruction at secondary level.
[Copyright Liverpool University Press 2017]

This paper evaluates the exceptionally forceful "mother-tongue" (MT) education policy in force in Hong Kong from 1998 to 2010, where instruction, print materials and assessments were required to be done in students' first language, Chinese. Apart from relevant literature, a number of sources are searched, including the quantitative data obtained from the Hong Kong Examination and Assessment Authority (HKEAA), qualitative data of surveys, and the official documents commissioned by the Education Bureau (EDB) within the period. While MT education has arguably minimized mixed-code teaching in content subjects, there is clear evidence that it failed to raise L2 standard through specialized teaching as promised. Much more students off the top tier being denied for admission to university, the principle of equality of educational participation is violated. A postmortem analysis, drawing on the more recent findings from the field of applied linguistics, shows that the adoption of bifurcation medium of instruction model and the ineffective L2 exposure are the culprits. All this, together with the lack of monitoring of the policy in its initial stage, are speculated as the major causes of its failure.