Bilingual education in Hong Kong

Abstract

Hong Kong exemplifies a special case in which the notions of `bilingual education' and `dominant language background' take on non-conventional meanings. First, only the immersion approach to bilingual education is officially accepted and bilingual classroom practices have been discouraged by the Hong Kong government as educationally unsound (Education Commission 1990, 1994, 1995). Government policies notwithstanding, Cantonese-English bilingual classroom practices are prevalent, albeit officially illegitimate, in what are nominally English medium secondary schools/universities. Second, although Cantonese is the mother tongue and the dominant, daily life, language of the majority of people in Hong Kong, English is the politically and socioeconomically dominant language.