CONSIDERING Hong Kong's long history under British rule, the general level of English language skills is curiously poor. In a number of countries never colonised or ''protected'' by Britain, the United States or any other English-speaking nation, English is spoken with greater fluency and by a far higher proportion of the population than it is here.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that businessmen are looking elsewhere for English-speaking staff. Frustrated with middle managers who cannot communicate properly with international employees and clients and tourism workers who hardly speak English, companies cannot be blamed for finding it a struggle to deal with the local workforce.
What is more surprising is that some international business leaders have turned to China as a source of good spoken English. They have asked for thousands of English speakers to be recruited from north of the border. Whatever the shortcomings of the territory's English language education, most Hong Kong people are used to assuming the mainland's is worse.
Foreign businessmen, however, make this leap of the imagination quite easily. The Chinese they come across in the course of their visits to the mainland - be they hotel staff or official guides and interpreters - are among the most highly skilled and educated the country has to offer. That they may also be completely unrepresentative of the vast majority of the population - unrepresentative even of those Chinese who speak English - matters little. The harsh reality is that the top half-per cent of a population of 1.2 billion still represents a larger skills pool than the top 10 per cent population of six million.
If Hong Kong is to retain its value both to the international community as a service hub for China and to the mainland as a point of contact with the rest of the world, it must develop the language skills to complement its financial and managerial expertise. Our schools and universities have to concentrate as never before on producing a generation of trilingual professionals. Foreign languages - as any Dutchman, Dane or Singaporean can attest - are not an academic luxury but an indispensable business tool for a small trading community. For the territory to maintain a competitive edge, Hong Kong people need to be equally at home in English, Mandarin and Cantonese.
But to achieve that goal, Hong Kong must also revolutionise its approach to teaching English. Why should a community whose native language is a Chinese dialect regard Mandarin as a foreign language, but English a second language every child should be able to absorb naturally? For the limited number of children sufficiently motivated and gifted to benefit from the way English traditionally has been thrust upon them in schools, the present system of total immersion is not to be bettered. For the remainder, who are not so much immersed as drowned in English at school, it is a waste of time and resources.