ABSTRACT
The inclusive education policy adopted by the Hong Kong education authority has allowed children with multiple backgrounds to be admitted to local schools, making the implementation of the territories’ “biliteracy and trilingualism” language policy a daunting task for most frontline teachers. Unlike Chinese second language learners in other parts of the world, non-Chinese-Speaking (NCS) students in Hong Kong have to master Cantonese first since it is the language spoken by 90 percent of the population and a medium of instruction (MOI) in most local schools. On the one hand, using Cantonese as MOI helps the students to link up a daily language with the classroom language. On the other, many teachers fail to realize that spoken Cantonese and formal written Chinese are on different poles of a language continuum and that the development of Cantonese oral competency would facilitate the development of children’s literacy skills. Many classroom activities focused on their differences rather than making use of their interrelationship to foster children’s Chinese language learning.
