The Ecology of Literacy in Hong Kong
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THE ECOLOGY OF LITERACY IN HONG KONG
I N T R O D U C T I O N : H O N G K O N G A S A C U LT U R A L AND LINGUISTIC CROSSROADS
The majority of people in Hong Kong are ethnically Chinese, and are either immigrants from southern China, especially from Guangdong and Fujian provinces, or descendants of immigrants from those regions of China. Hong Kong presents an interesting case for literacy research as one of the major meeting places of diverse peoples, cultures, and language varieties given its over 150 years’ history as a trading port ceded in 1842 from Dynastic China to Britain until 1997, when it was handed over to the People’s Republic of China as a Special Administrative Region keeping many of its existing legal and civil institutions intact. As an international financial city in the twenty-first century, it seems even more globalized than other cities in China and Asia with its advanced, globalized telecommunications systems, western free trade and legal institutions, and frequent flows of tourists and business executives from Mainland China, Taiwan and other parts of Asia and the world. The everyday literacy practices of the predominantly Cantonesespeaking people in Hong Kong are thus highly hybridized with linguistic and cultural influences from diverse sources, including frequent linguistic mixing and switching in both speech and writing. Such hybridized practices are, however, seldom seen as ‘good’ literacy practices by mainstream literacy education and government official norms. However, Hong Kong people’s everyday literacy practices have not been subjected to any serious linguistic planning or standardizing efforts of the government, either. While Cantonese can be written by newly made characters or by drawing on characters in written Chinese (see studies on newspaper literacy below), the Hong Kong government and official, educational institutions do not recognize Cantonese as a written language in its own right, but only as a spoken vernacular. School literacies and everyday literacies outside of school, thus, seem to be treated as two systems largely encapsulated from each other. Research studies in these two areas also seem to be encapsulated from each other due to traditionally little interaction between sociolinguists and literacy educators in Hong Kong. In this chapter I outline the development of literacy research in Hong Kong and propose some directions for future research that seek A. Creese, P. Martin and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 9: Ecology of Language, 291–303. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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to both respond to the emerging new media literacy practices among young people and to build bridges between school literacies and everyday literacies, drawing on the ecological framework of Continua of Biliteracy from Hornberger. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
Luke and Richards’ (1982) article on the status and functions of English in Hong Kong represents one of the early efforts in charting out the general
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