Emerging Multilingual Learners
Twenty years have passed since the sovereignty of Hong Kong was returned to the Peopleâs Republic of China in 1997. According to the latest population census (Census and Statistics Department 2017a), Hong Kongâs population reached 7.3 million people in 2016. Ethnic Chinese accounted for 6.8 million (92.0%) of that population, followed by the Filipinos (184,081) and Indonesians (153,291), the major sources of domestic workers. The white (Caucasians) population ranked as the third biggest group with a total population of 58,209. This was followed by South Asians, the largest minority group, which included within it Indians (36,462), Nepalese (25,472) and Pakistani (18,094). Over the past two decades since 1997, the population of non-ethnic Chinese has increased rapidly. The number of ethnic minorities born in Hong Kong increased by about 70% from 35,404 in 2001 to 60,088 in 2011. Though Hong Kong South Asians are often referred to as migrants, they have been present in Hong Kong since its earliest days. Like the Chinese, South Asians were one of the diasporic populations that helped found Hong Kong (Erni and Leung 2014). However, while some of them have enjoyed relatively high social status due to their ability to speak English, others have long been associated with social problems such as racial discrimination, unemployment and poverty. The 1997 handover fundamentally changed the linguistic habitat of South Asian minorities in Hong Kong. With English no longer the primary language of use in the public and education sectors, ethnic minorities found themselves with an urgent need to be proficient in Chinese.
As for language use in Hong Kong, about 88.1% of the population speaks Cantonese as their mother tongue, followed by 3.9% who speak Putonghua (Modern Standard Mandarin), 3.7% who speak other Chinese dialects, 1.4% who speak English and the remaining 2.8% who speak other languages. Among ethnic minorities aged 5 and over, English was the language most commonly spoken at home, with 45.6% of those surveyed reporting this as such. This was followed by Cantonese (30.3%), Filipino (4.4%), Indonesian (3.1%), Putonghua (1.3%), Japanese (1.3%) and other Chinese dialects (other than Cantonese and Putonghua) (0.3%) (Census and Statistics Department 2017b). English has been adopted by ethnic minorities as the lingua franca for communication in Hong Kong even after the handover (Zhang et al. 2011). Although 31.7% of those surveyed reported that they were able to speak Cantonese, it is difficult to know the exact level of their proficiency and literacy and the methods by which they acquired the language. Only 20.4% of South Asians surveyed were able to write Chinese. In addition to English and Cantonese, a good number of first languages (L1) were being spoken by South Asians in Hong Kong include Punjabi, Hindi, Pashto and Urdu. That is to say, ethnic minority students are already multilingual before they include Chinese into their linguistic repertoire. When it comes to learning Chinese, it is usually their third or fourth language.
Changing Language Policies in Education
The current policy promoted by the Hong Kong government is defined as âtrilingualism and biliteracyâ. That means that Hong Kong residents are expected to be trilingual in Cantonese, Mandarin and English and biliterate in English and standard Chinese in traditional characters. The urgent demand for Chinese as a second language education is due to the transition of political power in Hong Kong, which has profoundly influenced language-in-education policies and planning, particularly in school education (Poon 2010). Before the change of sovereignty, 94% of secondary schools adopted English as the medium of instruction (EMI) based on their own decisions. After the handover, however, out of a total of 421 schools in Hong Kong, only 114 schools were permitted to use EMI, while the other 307 schools were required to adopt Chinese as the medium of instruction (CMI). This change of medium of instruction (MoI) policy aroused strong emotional reactions as well as a plethora of MoI policy and classroom discourse research particularly during the first decade after 1997 (Tsui 2004). After the handover in 1997, when the biliterate trilingual language policy was officially implemented, the initiation of the compulsory Chinese medium stimulated growth in the proportion of Chinese medium secondary schools, leading to public protests by South Asians demanding more schooling in English (Gao 2011). The implementation of the mandatory mother-tongue education policy (fluent in academic Cantonese and literate in the traditional Chinese characters) has indeed benefited studentsâ academic performance and confidence (Marsh et al. 2000). However, Chinese is not the mother tongue for the majority of ethnic minority students, who had been studying through the medium of English during the British colonial period. Since EMI schools and international schools which adopt EMI for all subjects have become highly competitive and expensive, few ethnic minority students are able to outperform local students in securing a place at an EMI school, or have the family economic conditions for attending an elite international school.
To placate the demands for studying through an EMI, the Hong Kong government has increased English medium education for ethnic minorities in a few âdesignatedâ schools. However, Hong Kong Unison soon challenged the rationale of segregating ethnic minority students into isolated systems, calling for the removal of the label âdesignatedâ by integrating them into mainstream schools to produce a racially inclusive environment and allow for greater exposure to Chinese language input (South China Morning Post 2013). This rapid growth of ethnic minority students has caught many schools off guard in providing a well-structured multilingual or Chinese as a second language curriculum to help them prepare for mainstream Chinese schooling, therefore hindering their integration into Hong Kong society. Although some scholars have challenged the critical status of Chinese in determining the integration process (Fleming 2015), Chinese language skill remains a surviving tool for most ethnic students living and studying in Hong Kong. Research projects focusing on policy and curriculum developments for teaching Chinese to ethnic minority have become increasingly popular in the last couple of years. Numerous projects have been funded at the institutional and governmental level to investigate and improve CSL teaching and learning, though not much has been proved to be sustainable in the long run. The problem remains high on the governmentsâ agenda.
Many studies have reported that South Asian minorities in Hong Kong face racial discrimination and various kinds of difficulties in obtaining education and employment (Erni and Leung 2014; Tsung and Gao 2012; Gao 2011; Hong Kong Unison 2006). In particular, their lack of Chinese language proficiency has been identified as one of the most significant barriers preventing many ethnic minority students from progressing through the public education system (Ku et al. 2005; Li and Chuk 2015). Learning to use traditional Chinese characters for reading and writing for examination purpose will take years of practice. A survey by the Equal Opportunities Commission in 2012 showed that students from South Asia accounted for 3.2% of all primary school pupils, but just 1.1% of senior secondary students, and 0.59% of tertiary students. It is of utmost importance for ethnic minority students to acquire adequate Chinese language proficiency in order to enable them to have better opportunities to enter local tertiary institutions and to increase their upward social mobility. Though the government states that it expects all secondary school graduates to reach a multilingual standard (Education Bureau 2014), schools and universities seem to rely on the monolingual ideology to naturalise social stratification in the education system (Fleming 2015). Ethnic minority students deficient in Chinese can hardly improve their social status in Hong Kong. Power distribution in the sociopolitical sphere can be implicitly but proportionally transferable to the classroom. To this end, developing an appropriate curriculum and effective teaching strategies for Chinese as a second language has become a pressing issue for education in Hong Kong.
A One-Size-Fits-All Monolingual Curriculum
The large influx of Chinese as second language (CSL) learn...