A week in the life of a ‘finely tuned’ secondary school in Hong Kong

Abstract

The 2010/2011 academic year marked an important turning point in the development of Hong Kong's medium-of-instruction (MOI) policy as it offered secondary schools greater autonomy in determining their MOI policy. This paper examines the implementation of the new fine-tuning MOI policy in a representative secondary school. It compares its school-based language policy with students' (Years 7, 8 and 10) self-reported data about their actual use of English over a five-day week. At the junior secondary level (Years 7 and 8), the findings indicate a close alignment of policy and practice only in the English-medium subjects, whereas in some other subjects, the proportion of use of English could not be clearly determined due largely to the complexity of the school-based policy and teachers' flexibility and autonomy in practice. Furthermore, it is revealed that a highly sophisticated language-using situation at the senior secondary level (Year 10) poses potential challenges for the transition of students graduating from the junior level. The paper concludes by suggesting that a likely outcome of this newly implemented policy will be a return to the colonial government's laissez-faire policy in the 1980s and 1990s, where there was virtually no monitoring of policy implementation.

Keywords:

• policy implementation
• medium of instruction
• fine-tuning policy
• Chinese
• English
• Hong Kong

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of the article. I also would like to express my sincere gratitude to all the school staff and students for their assistance and participation during the collection of the data.

Notes

1. At this turning point near the handover, CMI teaching mainly referred to the use of Cantonese as the spoken code and traditional standard Chinese as the written language in texts, though there has been a tendency in recent years that some schools have replaced Cantonese with Putonghua (i.e. the national language of People's Republic of China) as the spoken medium in Chinese language and literature, as well as some other subjects (Davison and Auyeung Lai 2007; Tam 2012). While the adoption of Putonghua as the MOI is not a formal government policy, the rationale for using it mainly lies in its closer linguistic correspondence to standard written Chinese than Cantonese (Li 2006) and therefore its potential to enhance students' Chinese language literacy (SCOLAR 2003). Since 1997, Putonghua has also been a compulsory subject in both primary and secondary education in Hong Kong.

2. According to EDB, the new MOI arrangement allows schools to adopt different degrees of EMI teaching at the junior secondary level depending on (1) students' ability to learn through English, (2) teachers' capability to teach through English and (3) the adequacy of support measures at the school (see Education Commission 2005; EDB 2010 for further details).

3. Apart from the MOI planning in the surveyed schools, Kan et al. (2011) also report on other aspects of policy implementation such as respondents' views of the objectives of fine tuning, its impact on teachers and the constraints faced by schools. While most schools agreed with the objectives of fine tuning, namely (1) to enhance the English learning environment of the students, (2) to better meet parents' expectations and (3) to enhance the school's competiveness, the findings reveal a number of constraints facing schools, such as the lack of financial resources, the reduced number of English teachers and a shortage of content-area teachers.

4. As the fine-tuning policy aims to relax the former CMI/EMI streaming MOI policy by allowing more EMI teaching in non-language subject lessons, the proportion of increased English exposure by students is the key focus of the present study. To avoid confusion by the students when they completed the data log sheet, the general term ‘Chinese’ was used because CMI teaching also involves the use of standard written Chinese whereas Cantonese only refers to local people's spoken mother tongue. This term is therefore also used throughout the paper when discussing the findings.

5. In order to reduce the difficulty of the data log sheet, students were required to differentiate neither the use of receptive and productive aspects of the languages nor the diverse modes of a language (i.e. reading, writing, listening and speaking). It only asked for students' general perception about the use of different languages in various time intervals. This design sought to ensure the reliability of the instrument by making the data log sheet as simple as possible. Further information about the language-using situations in the classroom is supplemented by the interview and lesson observation data.