Mother tongue education in separate schools has been in the norm for several of China's large minorities since 1949. In recent years, however, the shift in minority parental demand, media focus on low educational outcomes of mother tongue education combined with government concerns about separatism have led to the development of mixed schools for…

This paper mainly discusses the issue of whether the English language should be attached the same importance in education as it was before in post-1997 Hong Kong. The status of English before 1997 in Hong Kong has been carefully compared from the sociolinguistic perspectives with that after Hong Kong returned to China in 1997. Both political and…

Examines the historical and socioeconomic context of classroom code switching in Hong Kong. Empirical analyses of actual instances of classroom code switching reveal this action to be the teachers' and students' local pragmatic response to the symbolic domination of English. The article concludes with a cost-benefit analysis of the Hong Kong…

There are at least 6,000--7,000 languages spoken in the world today, with over half of them endangered. And 61 percent of the endangered languages are within the Asia and Pacific Region. The publication is a report derived from the Regional (Asia and Pacific Region) Workshop on Mother Tongue/Bilingual Literacy Programs for Ethnic Minorities, held…