It is a tragic irony that we know so much about how languages are learned, yet continue to pursue a misguided teaching system. It is guaranteed to condemn our students to perpetual second-language mediocrity, and second-class citizenship in a globalised English environment.
The South China Morning Post reported this week that, in yet another attempt at compromise by a government advisory group, Chinese-medium secondary schools may be allowed to teach 15 per cent of their lessons in English.
Many Chinese schools actually want the figure to rise to between 30 and 50 per cent. In time, they will probably get what they want, and we will be back to square one: to the time before former chief executive Tung Chee-hwa introduced mother-tongue education - one of his many well-intentioned but muddled attempts at necessary reform.
Under Mr Tung's policy, only about 110 secondary schools are allowed to use English as the medium of instruction from Form One to Three. They are schools whose teachers can teach in English and 85 per cent of their students are judged capable of learning in the language. The other 400 schools must teach in Chinese. Chinese-medium schools may switch to English from Form Four - but at 15 or 16, most students are well past their prime age for learning another language.
The reformist rationale is that students should at least master their mother tongue and use it to learn other subjects, including English. Meanwhile, NET teachers - whose native tongue is English - would provide, if not immersion, at least exposure to native-level English in every school.
But the whole school-reform effort has been mired in elite-school opportunism, parental bias, anger and envy from enforced Chinese-medium schools, and government compromises. The original goal is now irreparably lost, assuming we ever had it in the first place.
The processes of learning a mother tongue are well understood, after decades of research in language acquisition and cognitive science. By an evolutionary fluke, we are all geniuses when it comes to our innate ability to learn new languages - an extraordinarily complicated task - until we are around seven or eight years old.
