Language in Hong Kong at Century's End

9. Our Future English Teachers: Language Use Among Graduate and Undergraduate TESL Students in Hong Kong

9 Our฀Future฀English฀Teachers:฀Language฀Use฀Among฀ Graduate฀and฀Undergraduate฀TESL฀Students฀in฀ Hong฀Kong฀ Martha C . Pennington and John Balla ABSTRACT฀ A profile is developed of language use by two groups of Hong Kong bilingual English majors, one of whom are BA students and the other of whom are a Post-Graduate Diploma group of practising secondary teachers. Both group s repor t som e orientatio n t o mixed languag e (English and Cantonese) use, with a greater orientation to English in the older, more educated group. In particular, both languages are used in the tutorial context, which combines characteristics of friendship/ solidarity and education/status domains . INTRODUCTION฀ The ter m 'diglossia ' (Ferguson , 1959 ; Fishman, 1967 , 1971 ) refer s t o a situation in which two languages or varieties of a language co-exist in on e society, each with distinctive functions. I n diglossic communities, often a s a result of the political domination of one people by another, one languag e is use d i n th e formal , o r 'high' , domain s o f government , education , law , and business , whil e th e othe r i s generally use d i n th e informal , o r Tow' , domains of home, family, and friendship. The former can be seen as domains where statu s an d hierarch y ar e reinforced , whil e th e latte r ar e domain s where solidarity and equality are established. According to Fishman (1971): "[I]n such communitie s eac h generation begins anew wit h a monolingua l or restricte d repertoir e bas e o f heart h an d home , an d mus t b e rendere d 244฀Marth a฀C.฀Pennington฀and฀John฀Balla฀ bilingual or provided with a fuller repertoir e by the formal institutions of education, religion, government or the work sphere" (p. 544). Thus, the functional separation of languages into 'high' and Tow' means that those in each new generation born into families whose home language is th e Tow ' languag e must , i f the y wil l become educate d an d advanc e themselves in the society, learn the 'high' language as a second language. Diglossia therefor e pressure s t o individual bilingualism — in particular , among thos e wh o d o no t spea k th e 'high ' languag e a s a native tongue . Diglossia als o support s an d maintain s societa l bilingualism , i n tha t a community ha s littl e nee d fo r tw o language s whic h serv e th e sam e functions, as Fishman (1967) has pointed out. The condition of diglossia often results historically from a combination of governmental regulations mandating the use of a particular language in official contexts and social influences pressuring to use of one or the other language wit h differen t audience s an d i n differen t communicationa l contexts. When the political and social conditions which cause diglossia to come into being change and a community no longer has a reason to maintain two separat e languages , th e de facto condition s o f languag e us e ma y overwhelm dejure constraints. When this happens, one language will take over the domains of the other, or else a compromise code that is a mixture of the two original languages will develop (Kahane and Kahane, 1979). In the usual case, one language or the other — generally, the most 'politically correct' or socially useful on e — will serve as the syntactic base, or matrix language (Myer s Scotton, 1992, 1993), of the mixed code, while the othe r serves as a source of lexical items. Writing in the early 1980s, Luke and Richards (1982) described Hon g Kong as a community i n which Cantonese serve d a s an everyday Tow ' language and English as an auxiliary 'high' language, with a small number of 'linguistic middlemen' bridging between the Cantonese-speaking an d the English-speaking sectors of the community In the years since that time, the languag e situatio n i n Hon g Kon g ha s change d considerably , a s Cantonese has rapidly gained in status as a language of regional business, popular culture (for example, as manifested in 'Canto-Pop' songs and 'kung fu' movies), and the written media (Bauer, 1988), while English at the same time has slipped down from its former position as the...