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Will Clem

In local schools sometime relatively soon, students may be studying core lessons in Putonghua, attending classes on the cultural significance of Cantonese as a written language, and discussing in English how to evaluate the quality of information in an online source.
That is the vision of tomorrow that a leading teacher-educator spelled out at the Hong Kong Institute of Education last night.
Andy Kirkpatrick, head of the Tai Po teacher-training college's English Department, said a more linguistically sound approach was needed to address the challenges posed when Putonghua 'inevitably' becomes the main medium of instruction in local schools.
'The goal is to create trilingual people, and we need to look at how we can achieve that,' Professor Kirkpatrick said.
His talk, 'One Country, Two Systems, Three Languages', given with HKIEd senior research assistant Michael Chau Ho-fai, laid out a three-pronged strategy that has each of the languages playing a different but complementary role in turning schools into 'multilingual sites'.
The plan would see an end to the criticised policy of segregating schools into Chinese-medium and English-medium.
Professor Kirkpatrick told Education Post  he predicted that Putonghua could be rolled in as the main language of instruction 'in three to five years'.
'Putonghua is the national language and increasingly one of international prestige and power,' he said. 'I think pretty soon the call will come from stakeholders for it to be used as the medium of instruction.' This was because people were  'more and more feeling proud of being part of China' and  recognised the 'linguistic capital' of being able to speak the language well.
'I think there is an opportunity for Hong Kong to do something pretty exciting,' he said.
Although there were not enough qualified Putonghua teachers, teaching graduates were keen to get trained up so numbers would soon be there.
Professor Kirkpatrick envisages that Cantonese could be the teaching language for the first three years of primary school while children developed basic literacy, with the other two languages being taught as subjects. Schools would switch to Putonghua for most classes in higher forms. But the system would also include a mechanism to 'support' students' use of Cantonese throughout their school careers.
'Even though Cantonese is likely to remain the Hong Kong language of identity for the foreseeable future, Cantonese will still need support,' he said. 'We need to treat it as a written language and raise students' awareness that it has a long history in written form. Students should become proud of it as a language.'
This model of supplanting students' native language with a different language of instruction but keeping support for the original tongue is based on a successful approach to teaching French to English-speaking students in Canada.
'It is relatively easy to do that with two languages that are cognate,' he said, adding that while Putonghua and Cantonese were related, it was more complicated to switch students to English.
Perhaps most controversially, Professor Kirkpatrick's plan calls for less emphasis to be placed on English language until later on in schooling - totally contrary to the prevailing demands from local parents.
'It takes a lot longer for local students to become literate in Chinese than it does to become literate in English or other alphabetic languages,' he said. 'It is important they gain literacy in Chinese first.'
But he hopes policy decisions on how to do that can be influenced more by real research than purely political considerations - which he said were often based on common misconceptions.
'We need to understand the nature of trilingualism. It is not three monolingual speakers in one head,' he said. 'There is a completely false expectation that we are going to get complementary trilinguals, speaking all three languages at native-speaker level. We need to realise that just doesn't happen.'
It was impractical to expect every student to attain fluency to the level of a native speaker, but they could be taught 'functional' fluency in all three languages.
'Successful local trilinguals should become both role and linguistic models for children. There are a lot of people who could be used to motivate kids,' he said.
Professor Kirkpatrick is no stranger to the concept of being multilingual. He did his undergraduate degree in Chinese studies at Leeds University in Britain, before doing a postgraduate diploma in Chinese literature at Fudan University, in Shanghai. He went on to do a master of arts in English language teaching and linguistics at York University in Britain, then later a PhD in Chinese rhetoric at the Australian National University, Canberra. He has been with HKIEd's English department since 2006.
He said more needed to be done to sell the concept of functional language skills to local parents to persuade them to stop judging children as having 'failed' if they did not attain perfect fluency.
Hong Kong students needed to be taught English in the context in which they would actual use it in later life, rather than aiming at linguistic perfection.
Professor Kirkpatrick said there were essentially two functions the language fulfilled: as a communication tool when meeting people from other cultures, most of whom would not be native speakers, and as a means to access information.
'The English-language curriculum needs to reflect these two functions,' he said. 'English can become the medium of instruction of in-depth courses in cross-cultural understanding. The native English teacher scheme should be expanded to include multilingual English teachers from around the region, people whose first language is not English but who are nevertheless success cases in learning the language. Then students can see English being used by Asians to communicate with other Asians.'
English was the international lingua franca, and students needed to understand the level of 'functional performance' required to communicate effectively.
'When the emerging powers of Brazil, China, Russia and India meet, they speak English,' he said. 'They don't need to speak like native speakers to communicate.'
One subject he would like to see introduced into the secondary curriculum and taught in English is something he termed 'critical literacy'.
'This would teach students how to start making judgments of the quality of the information they were reading,' he said. 'The courses would be about understanding the process of learning and gleaning information.'
These skills would be required after students left school, whether at university or into the workplace, as English was the 'international language of scholarship and knowledge transmission'. But the critical thought processes behind the course would be transferable to other languages.
Professor Kirkpatrick acknowledged that his proposal would require a major shift in perception, but he believed it could be achieved if there was the political will.
'What will sell it to parents is the functionality,' he said. 'A child who graduates trilingual in Cantonese, Putonghua and English and functionally bi-literate in Chinese and English should be about the most employable person on the planet, especially if he or she is confident in his or her own identity.'



Time to give trilingual a try, says professor