Minority Education and Cosmopolitanism in a Hong Kong Multilingual School

Abstract

This paper draws from a pilot sociolinguistic ethnography carried out in the context of a Hong Kong local school coping with declining enrolment that had recently implemented an International Division aimed at teaching multilingual ethnic minority students through English as a medium of instruction, while maintaining a local division serving the school’s majority Chinese student population. By paying attention to the local transformation of the school, in response to wider institutional processes of change and national policies of educational reform, the analysis will focus on the related tensions for all actors involved, including the teachers, students and parents across the so-called “local” and “international” divisions. Particular emphasis will be made on the shifting value officially and inter-personally attached to different languages in everyday discursive practices, namely internationally prestigious such as English, nationally endorsed in after-1997 reforms such as Cantonese Chinese, or languages linked to other Asian working class citizens living in contemporary Hong Kong such as Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi or Nepali. Analysis will focus on one group of students with Pakistani and Nepali background and one of his teachers in the International Division. On the basis of their multilingual repertoires and transnational networks, these participants dealt with these institutional transformations and local tensions by constructing cosmopolitan identities which allowed them to dis-align with processes of social stratification underpinning contemporary globalization in the Hong Kong context while fictionally positioning themselves as better prepared for the new globalized economy than their Chinese local peers.