ABSTRACT
In postcolonial, neocolonial and globalized Asian societies English is still commonly regarded as a global language that offers students career advancement potential and an economically driven form of cultural capital. In Hong Kong society, for example, Bob Adamson and Winnie Auyeung Lai argue that “after the Second World War, the link between economic development and English, as the major international language of commerce, communications and education, became a more persuasive rationale for its inclusion in the curriculum” (1997: 236). English has long been associated with economic success among Hong Kong students. Mee-Ling Lai has argued that Hong Kong students generally evaluate English strongly in terms of “its instrumental value and status” (2005: 373). Students regard English as a language that has a strong utility factor in that it enables them to obtain better jobs and “better opportunities for further studies” (373). However, research has also examined the detrimental effects of this overreliance on English in certain Asian contexts. A. M. Y. Lin (1996) has argued that the privileging of English in Hong Kong has produced a situation that “legitimize[s] the subordination of all sociocultural and educational goals to the single goal of mastering a socially, culturally, and linguistically distant language” for the majority of children in Hong Kong. However, while the economic and cultural role English plays may be less pronounced than it once was, it is still an important factor for many students in universities in Hong Kong, Mainland China and Japan.
