Language-based Bifurcation of Secondary Schools in Hong Kong: Past, Present & Future

The proposal of the Education Commission Report No.4 (ECR4) to stream seventy per cent and thirty per cent of Secondary One students into Chinese-medium and English-medium sectors has rekindled the debate concerning the desirability of allowing over 90 per cent of local secondary students to receive their education in Anglo-Chinese Secondary Schools which profess to use English as a medium of instruction. This debate can be dated back to the release of a report on the effects of medium of instruction on local students published by Siu et al. in 1979. Since then, the issue has been taken up by the Llewellyn Commission in 1981 (Llewellyn et al., 1982), the Education Commission in 1984 (ECR1), The Report of the Working Group set up to Review Language Improvement Measures in 1989, and, most recently, the Education Commission’s Fourth Report (ECR4).