Bilingual Education: Southeast Asian Perspectives

5 - Research on Bilingual Education in Hong Kong

Research in the 1970s and the Early 1980s Studies in the 1970s and early 1980s are characterized by the general aim of proving the superiority of mother-tongue education over English-medium education. 5 Research on Bilingual Education in Hong Kong In this chapter, an overview of key empirical studies conducted on issues related to the medium of instruction in Hong Kong schools is presented. The overview follows a chronological order and covers key studies in four main periods: (1) from the 1970s to the early 1980s, (2) the 1980s, (3) the 1990s, and (4) the 2000s. Major research ndings in the past three decades point to the general lack of prerequisites for successfully implementing English-medium education in the majority of secondary schools in Hong Kong. The unfavourable conditions found in these allegedly English-medium schools include: 1. inadequate English skills of the students to benet from studying in English, 2. lack of language support provided by the school to these students, 3. lack of professional development opportunities for both EMI content teachers and English language subject teachers, 4. lack of Language-Across-the Curriculum (LAC) co-ordination: little coordination among EMI content teachers themselves as well as between the EMI content teachers and English language subject teachers, and 5. unsuccessful design and implementation of the existing Bridging Courses (i.e., the Longman and Macmillan Bridging Courses). In the nal section of this chapter future directions for research are outlined. 88 Bilingual Education: Southeast Asian Perspectives In 1973, Cheng, Shek, Tse and Wong highlighted the educational problems created among Chinese children by English-medium secondary school education in Hong Kong with their paper, “At what Cost?” They surveyed 170 Cantonese-speaking rstyear university students, half of whom had just completed secondary education in the English medium. Seventy-three percent of these students thought that using English as the medium of instruction imposed a heavy burden on them, and yet 54% said they would still choose English medium. In 1979, Siu et al. published a research report on the effects of the medium of instruction on students’cognitive development and academic achievement, demonstrating the superior effects of using Chinese rather than English as the medium of instruction for students with below average academic ability. Both Cheng et al. (1973) and Siu et al. (1979) argued for the need to inform the public about the benets of mother-tongue education. In 1981, the government commissioned a team of visiting foreign experts to undertake a review of the education system in Hong Kong. The resulting Llewellyn Report (1982) highlighted the problems created by large-scale English immersion in what is de facto, although not de jure, still a monolingual society: It is the form rather than the substance that still counts in Hong Kong where one is subject to the spectacle of a born-and-bred Hong Kong speaker of Cantonese going through the ritual of instructing Cantonese-speaking pupils by means of a language in which both teacher and taught have little competence. (Llewellyn et al, 1982, p. 28) The Llewellyn Report suggested that the crux of the matter of English-medium education is bound up with social status and labour market appeal. It recommended that the government embark on a long-term project of changing parents’ and employers’ attitudes towards Chinese as a teaching medium, by providing more resources to Chinese-medium schools and by offering a quota to assure a proportion of admissions from Chinesemedium secondary school graduates to higher study and the civil service. It also suggested that the government could, alternatively, acknowledge the reality of widespread bilingual oral practices in the classrooms of nominally English-medium schools and make serious attempts to improve the effectiveness of this reality by developing genuinely bilingual curriculum strategies. Research in the 1980s Research in the 1980s is characterized by a series of studies by Johnson on the effects of bilingual medium, both oral and written (e.g., Johnson, 1983; Johnson et al., 1985; Johnson & Lee, 1987). Johnson investigated the effects of various modes of presentation and questioning (e.g., English/Chinese/bilingual texts and questions, or different combinations of them). He also looked at the code-switching strategies used by experienced teachers in English-medium schools. Research studies in this period are characterized by optimism about the possibility of developing bilingual oral and/or written strategies in English- Research on Bilingual Education in Hong Kong 89 medium schools...