| In Oct.1997, the document entitled 'Guideline on Medium of Instruction in Secondary Schools' was issued. This document ruled that of the 407 publicly-run secondary schools, 114 would be classified as English and 293 would be classified as Chinese. The implementation of this policy brought about a series of problems, which had strong impacts on schools.;Using a qualitative multiple case analysis with data secured from school principals, teachers, parents and pupils, the thesis aims at explaining the issue and its related phenomena. However, given its qualitative nature, it does not look for causal relationship among the variables examined. The data was collected from 3 types of secondary schools: two schools using English as medium of instruction, two traditional Chinese schools, and two that had gone through the conversion from English to Chinese. Principals and selected S.1 teacher, S.2 pupil and parent samples of the 3 types of schools were interviewed. The research questions are: What impact has the 'medium of instruction policy' had on different types of schools? How does the language policy affect school administration, teaching and learning, students and their parents? What implication has the findings of the language policy had in term of its future development?;Findings indicated that the language policy had tremendous impacts on administration, teaching and learning in all types of schools. Both Chinese and English secondary schools were entangled in problems such as: higher student mobility and school down-sizing, transitional instruction problems between S.3 to S.4 and unexpected disturbances of the new language policy to the processes of teaching and learning. Teachers' professionalism and societal preferences were incongruent, and that the aims and objectives of schooling and education were distorted. This study therefore proposes instruction through the mother tongue in junior secondary years, establishment of secondary schools for gifted pupils, revising existing university admission criteria, promoting training of students fluent in English, Cantonese and Putonghua. These are areas that policy makers have to explore if they intend to create a healthy and nurturing environment for pupils in Hong Kong in meeting the challenges of the 21 st century. |
