More schools are expected to use English as a medium of instruction in the future following a government proposal to give secondary schools more freedom to determine the language in which they wish to teach.
Under the plan, schools with 85 per cent of their Form One intake in the academic top 40 per cent will have full autonomy in deciding their own language policy. Schools that do not meet the 85 per cent requirement can conduct up to a quarter of their non-language subject class time in English.
Though adjustments to the medium of instruction policy can be easily made, successful implementation will be far more difficult to achieve.
'It is what happens in the classroom and how teachers approach the teaching of their subject in English that is far more important than the policy. Changing what teachers do is far more difficult, but this is an area that is often overlooked,' said Philip Hoare, associate professor at the Hong Kong Institute of Education's department of English.
'Getting teachers to teach in a language that isn't their native tongue is not like flipping a switch,' Dr Hoare said, adding that teachers and students can face a barrage of challenges in the process.
'Not only do students need to understand and learn the new subject content, they also need to be able to do it in another language, and that is a very complex process,' said Dr Hoare. 'As a rule of thumb, we tell teachers to assume that students can only understand about 50 per cent of what they say because the subject is new to them. They are not learning in their first language and you have to take into account all the usual classroom distractions such as students not concentrating fully all the time,' said Dr Hoare. 'For teachers who use English as a medium of instruction, everything has to be done bigger and better in order to help students understand.'
The Hong Kong Institute of Education's eight-week professional development course for teachers using English as the medium of instruction in secondary schools is designed to help them attain a better grasp of English as a language of instruction, and tackle some of these difficulties.