The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology
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10 The Linguist Vol/54 No/6 2015 www.ciol.org.uk FEATURES national lingua franca, Putonghua (literally, 'the common language') reigns supreme. Exceptions are the languages spoken by members of the 55 officially recognised national minority groups. In practice, however, the teaching of these languages has been unsuccessful, not least because most parents want their children to learn the national language and, of course, English. The only real success in the teaching of minority languages has been with Korean and Mongolian, and this is due to economic reasons, as both languages are useful for cross-border trade. The languages of national minority peoples, such as the Yi, Miao and Zhuang, are dying, replaced in large part by Putonghua. The first foreign language learned in Chinese schools is English. This is introduced at grade 3, or earlier in private schools and government schools in middle-class urban areas such as parts of Shanghai and Nanjing. Parents who can afford it send their children to extra English classes, and the wealthy send their children overseas to escape the intensely competitive nature of Chinese education. This also happens in Korea, where such families are known as 'wild geese families' because the father flies to the English-speaking nation once a year to see his wife and children. Such is the sacrifice – both financial and emotional – that many are prepared to make to give their children an edge. Hong Kong is the only place where Cantonese can be taught as a language of education; it remains the medium of instruction in most government primary schools. The government's policy is that it wants educated Hong Kong citizens to be trilingual (in Cantonese, Putonghua and English) and biliterate (in Chinese and English). This is a laudable aim, but apart from the slogan itself, the government has no guidelines or template about how trilingualism and biliteracy might be achieved. The post-handover government of 1997 did insist that the medium of instruction in primary schools was to be Cantonese and introduced strict criteria, which secondary schools wanting to teach in English had to meet. As a result, only about 25% of secondary schools were allowed to become English Medium of Instruction (EMI) schools, with the remainder classified as Chinese Medium (CMI) schools. While well-intentioned, the division created a hierarchy of schools in the minds of parents, not least because six of the eight government- funded universities are EMI. Only the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and the Hong Kong Institute of Education are CMI, and CUHK, in its desire to internationalise and move up the rankings, has controversially increased the number of its EMI programmes. It is not surprising, therefore, that parents with children in CMI schools constantly badgered the government to allow more classes to be taught in English, as they felt that CMI prejudiced their children's chances of getting into university. The government finally caved in and announced a 'fine-tuning' of the policy, which allowed more classes in CMI schools to be taught in English. This was unfortunate, as children and teachers who had been learning and teaching perfectly successfully in Chinese now found themselves learning and teaching the same subjects in English. Many teachers now had to teach some classes in Chinese and some in English. Nevertheless, Hong Kong's language policy has been relatively successful, with a high percentage of citizens achieving excellent literacy in Chinese, as well as having some proficiency in English. It is the very wealthy who may have excellent skills in English but be less proficient in Chinese, at least with the writing system. A designated mother tongue In Singapore, the bilingual policy can be described as English + 1 – the '1' being your designated mother tongue. The government actually designates your mother tongue, so that if you are ethnically Chinese, your mother tongue is Mandarin (no matter that your mother might actually be a speaker of another Chinese language), if you are ethnically Malay, it is Malay, and if Indian, it is Tamil. The original idea behind the bilingual policy was that the 'mother tongue' would provide the roots to one's culture and that English would provide access to the modern world. In effect, English has taken over both roles, with the colloquial version of Singaporean English taking over the cultural roots and identity role, and a more formal variety taking over the access to modernisation role. HARSH LESSONS Children in Thailand are taught English and Thai from a young age to the detriment of other languages (right); and Andy Kirkpatrick delivers the Threlford Memorial Lecture (above) © CHRIS CHRISTODOULOU