Fashioning 'designer bilinguals' : ethnography of language policy in a private school in China's Hong Kong

Abstract

In the fields of bilingual education, and language policy and planning, the social scientific gaze has mostly directed towards minority or working-class contexts. Relatively little research has spotlighted how elite forms of bilingualism are discursively ideologized in schools despite the growing body of scholarship on elite schools. This three-year ethnography of language policy seeks to explore how elite bilingualism is constructed in the context of a private school in Hong Kong, established after the handover of sovereignty in 1997. The school, which I name Cathay College in this study, is an English-Putonghua bilingual school. I adopt ethnographic-critical approaches to examine the dynamic interplay of language policy processes, language ideologies, and language practices of individuals in the context. The three focal participants were students in the two-year International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP), who have been enrolled in the school for a minimum of ten years. Two of them were from local families whose dominant language is Cantonese, and one came from an expatriate English-dominant family and grew up in Hong Kong. The other 29 participants included their classmates and teachers, as well as the alumni and school management. I conducted ethnographic field work as an insider-researcher in my own workplace and employed qualitative content analysis as a principled method of analysis. The use of student-produced ‘language learning trajectory grids’ provides an emic perspective for the researcher and facilitates reflexive understanding for the participants. The empirical findings showed that ethnography of language policy affords a holistic and dynamic view for unpacking language policy processes, uncovering language ideologies and exploring policy consequences. This study offers insights into elite bilingualism as a discursive construction and as social practice, and illuminates how language may be ideologized to create distinction, naturalize exclusion and perpetuate social stratification. It provides nuanced and contextualized understandings of elite bilingualism, unveiling how elite bilingualism constitutes a strategic joint effort between school and family, and analyzes its social and material consequences on the students. While the school language policy was created to fashion a kind of ‘designer bilingual’ to meet the changing market demands, the focal participants through their own self-fashioning came to become multilingual in their own right. The study also reveals and discusses the shifting discourses of language-related eliteness and the morphing of Hong Kong’s colonial elitism. It illustrates how the distinct but interconnected constructs of language ideology and language policy can enrich our understandings of the institutionalization of language in educational spaces. Reflections on the ethical and methodological considerations for researching one’s own place were offered, and suggestions for further research were given.