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Pupils 'better off learning in Cantonese'

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Top students in Band One English-medium secondary schools perform no better than their counterparts in low band Chinese-medium ones in subjects like history and science, a government study on medium of instruction has revealed.

The results back the government's position that the vast majority of students in Hong Kong are better off learning in their mother-tongue.

But elite schools and the advocates of English-medium schooling argue that the study only presents one side of the picture and highlights the defects of the secondary school places allocation system.

The study, carried out by Hau Kit-tai, chair professor of the Department of Educational Psychology at Chinese University of Hong Kong, will form the basis of the Education Commission's review of medium of instruction next year.

Since 1998, the government has required schools to educate in Chinese unless their teachers and students can teach and learn effectively in English - 223 secondary schools were ordered to switch to teaching in Chinese, while the remaining 114 were allowed to continue instruction in English.

Professor Hau has been tracking the performance of 10,000 secondary students since the mid-1990s. Schools were compared within each of the five bands in the old banding system.

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