Supporting ethnic minority students learning the Chinese language in multilingual Hong Kong

Abstract

This paper examines progress made in four schools in Hong Kong over a two-year period in providing for students with markedly different language backgrounds and competence learning Chinese in the same classrooms. It centres in particular on ways of delivering the curriculum to classes containing immigrant and local children, a growing issue in Hong Kong where the number of non-Chinese speaking school-age children has doubled since the year 2000. The Hong Kong Equal Opportunities Commission has ex-pressed concern about the impact on the indigenous local students of steps taken to integrate their non-Chinese speaking immigrant peers into Hong Kong’s schools. This paper considers a number of intervention strategies, including streaming by ability, grouping students according to their mother tongue, providing differentiated instructional materials and learning objectives and deploying resources specifically designed for linguistically disadvantaged students. Shortcomings in provision are discussed as well as problems faced by children who speak a “foreign” language in school and go home to envi-ronments in which only their mother tongue is spoken. Comment is directed at opportunities for non-Chinese speaking students to learn their mother tongue in school and at steps taken by schools to engi-neer multicultural environments.