A linguistic seesaw
Now that Hong Kong has returned to Chinese rule, what path should its people follow? Language policy is a touchstone. The linguistic standard now unfurled by the Hong Kong government is one of "biliteracy and trilingualism"-they hope that Hong Kong people can be proficient in reading and writing both English and Chinese, and in speaking Cantonese, English and Mandarin. From September 1998, the Hong Kong government explicitly requires all primary schools to start teaching Mandarin in Form 1, and secondary schools to start teaching it in Forms 1 and 4; in subsequent years it is to be gradually extended to all forms. The government is also considering adding Mandarin to the subjects tested in the secondary school Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examinations (HKCEE) from next year.
Is "biliteracy and trilingualism" achievable? In the view of many Hong Kong scholars, the goal set by the Hong Kong government is no more than an ideal. Professor Wang Gungwu, former vice-chancellor of the University of Hong Kong, has said that to expect every Hong Kong schoolchild to achieve a high level of proficiency in all these varieties of language is not practicable. "If five to ten percent can gain a good mastery of the written forms of both Chinese and English, we will be doing pretty well," he wrote in an article in the Ming Pao Monthly. But others have said that because of Hong Kong's colonial past, it already possesses a multilingual environment similar to that of Europe or nearby countries such as Singapore, so promoting written and spoken multilingualism in Hong Kong is not beyond the bounds of possibility.
Will the goal of biliteracy and trilingualism bring with it the problem that individual pupils will master none of the languages fully? For the purposes of school education, which language should be the main one, and does this choice imply precedence of one over another? Also, will the languages interfere with one another?
Ip Kin Yuen observes that except in a very natural linguistic environment, "for instance where the father is English and the mother Chinese," language learning theory suggests that a foreign language is best studied on the basis of a "mother tongue," especially in adulthood. The firmer the grounding in the mother tongue, the more successful study of the foreign language is likely to be. Furthermore, despite the fact that humans have unlimited language learning potential, and in some European countries children naturally become fluent in three or four languages and can use them appropriately in different linguistic situations (thus, to return to Ip's example, a child growing up in a bilingual environment will naturally speak Chinese with its mother and English with its father, in what linguists refer to as "code switching"), this depends on the linguistic environment, complemented by school training. Ip is very doubtful whether Hong Kong does indeed provide such a multilingual environment.
It seems that only time will tell whether the goal of fivefold linguistic proficiency can be attained, and currently what most worries the Hong Kong public at large is whether the promotion of mother tongue instruction in Cantonese will be at the expense of English teaching. "If we lose the former linguistic environment in which teaching and textbooks were all in English, will our standard of English go into a terminal decline?" This is one of the doubts raised in Hong Kong's newspapers by people in favor of retaining the system of English-medium schools. This has prompted the Hong Kong government to repeatedly cite statistics which suggest that mother-tongue instruction need not lead to a decline in English.
A research report quoted by the Education Department indicates that in "language-loaded" subjects (subjects with a strong linguistic component), such as geography, history or science, the performance of pupils taught in their mother tongue is clearly better than that of those taught in English, yet their grades in English do not fall behind those of pupils in English-medium schools as a result.
Education is one source of Hong Kong's vitality. Many Hong Kong people f eel that the coastal territory's special skills in English help make it an asset which mainland China should value.