THE SOCIAL SELECTION OF AN ENGLISH-DOMINANT BILINGUAL EDUCATION SYSTEM IN HONG KONG: AN ECOLINGUISTIC ANALYSIS (SOCIOLINGUISTICS, LANGUAGE POLICY)

Hong Kong is a monolingual (Cantonese-speaking) society, yet ninety percent of her students opt English-medium(EM) secondary schools over Chinese-medium(CM) Middle Schools. To put this phenomenon into perspective, a model of intrasystemic social selection of institutions is developed. The thesis derived is that the dominance of the EM stream in Hong Kong's bilingual education system is mainly caused by infrastructural changes after the 1949 Chinese Communist Revolution; it is a case of "social mutation" and differential social selection. This thesis is substantiated by findings indicating that variation in people's educational language choices correlated closer to demographic, economic and opportunity structural changes, and the growing significance of English proficiency as a vehicle of social mobility than to institutional and ideological factors. The government's English-oriented educational language policy seems to be a minor factor.; However, it is evidently impractical to use an essentially foreign language in mass secondary education. To examine the pedagogical consequences; survey, instruction, linguistic and examination data for 530 students from eight schools in both EM and CM streams were collected. Major findings from data on students studying in the EM stream showed that: (1) There were extensive EM and CM mixing and switching in most sampled classrooms, indicating total EM oral instruction was rarely practiced and that it would be inappropriate to frame the medium of instruction issue in a dichotomous fashion. (2) Academic performance of students of lower ability and/or lower English proficiency could be adversely affected although the vernacular hypothesis was a powerful explanatory factor in the performance of other students. (3) Even though the majority of the sampled students indicated that they had learning problems associated with the use of the EM, most of them preferred to continue their education in EM schools.; It is concluded that to reverse the current trend by legislative means would be counter-productive. A productive approach would be to better adapt both linguistic streams to the social selection process. Such measures should involve a flexible but systematic usage of the CM in the EM stream, the development of a credible English program in the CM stream, and a tightening of the relationship between the teaching of English and the linguistic needs of EM education.