Impacts of Medium of Instruction on Language Attitudes: A Case of Hong Kong
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Impacts of Medium of Instruction on Language Attitudes: A Case of Hong Kong Mee Ling Lai
Published online: 29 December 2012 De La Salle University 2012
Abstract Shortly after the political handover from Britain to China, mother tongue education was enforced in Hong Kong, which mandated the majority of the local secondary schools to switch the medium of instruction (MoI) from English to Chinese. Henceforth, schools were divided into Chinese-medium and English-medium. In 2001, a study was conducted to examine the attitudes of these two groups of students toward the three official spoken languages used in Hong Kong after the change of sovereignty (i.e., Cantonese, English, and Putonghua). Eight years later, a similar study was reconducted to trace the changes of students’ perceptions upon relaxation of the mother tongue education policy. This article reports on a comparison between the two studies, through which the impacts of MoI policies on students’ language attitudes were explored. Keywords Medium of instruction Language policy Language attitudes Hong Kong
Introduction Hong Kong is a city where 93.6 % of its population is ethnic Chinese and 89.5 % of them are speaking Cantonese (a Chinese dialect) as their usual language (Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department 2011). In 1997, the sovereignty of Hong Kong was returned to China from Britain. Henceforth, Hong Kong was no longer a British colony, but a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. One year after the change of M. L. Lai (&) Department of English, Hong Kong Institute of Education, HKIED, 10, Lo Ping Road, Tai Po, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected]
sovereignty, the mandatory mother tongue education policy was imposed on local secondary schools despite strong public resistance. Before that, 90 % of the schools were using English as the medium of instruction (EMI), although many of them were teaching in a mixed code of English and Cantonese in reality. Under the new policy, all secondary schools must switch to Chinese as the default medium of instruction (CMI) unless they could prove the capability of both their staff and students in teaching and learning through English. As a result, 114 schools retained the EMI status, while more than 300 schools transformed into CMI (Tsui et al. 1999). The mother tongue education policy was met with strong resistance from the public when implemented as it was commonly believed that the policy would deprive CMI students of the chance to acquire the essential linguistic capital (i.e., English) and would consequently reduce their competitive edge in the future and lead to social stratification (Evans 2009). In addition, the policy was criticized for the labeling effects it created, which enhanced the status of EMI students as the elite and lowered that of the CMI students into second-class achievers. As stated in Li (2010): CMI students are the most vulnerable stakeholder groups, for they are the ones who bear the brunt of stigmatization. Many have to cope really hard to overcome the psycho
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