Struggling to Thrive: The Impact of Chinese Language Assessments on Social Mobility of Hong Kong Ethnic Minority Youth

Abstract

The paper explores how the policy of alternative Chinese qualifications policy affect ethnic minorities' (EM) social mobility, and how such multi-exit assessment framework affect Chinese as a second language (CSL) learning and teaching in Hong Kong. Chinese language (CL) qualifications other than the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education have been accepted by the University Grants Committee (UGC)-funded institutions in Hong Kong as university admission requirements, including General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE), and General Certificate of Education (GCE). These international qualifications are oftentimes considered lower-level non-equivalents to HKDSE in the job market. Even high achievers in these examinations are criticized by local employers as less-than-competent in workplace Chinese communication. Moreover, civil service jobs traditionally popular among EM require a Level 2 in HKDSE or specific government tests, which "implied" the said alternative qualifications as insufficient for career advancement. CL teachers and EM students are thus torn between the manageable alternative qualifications to improve university admission chances, or the difficult HKDSE examination as well for better career opportunities, which reduce their chance of upward mobility. Through triangulation of interview data from an EM focus group (N=8, all female), relevant surveys and government documents, the authors argue that EM students' academic advancement is highly related to their CL proficiency, and alternative qualifications do not necessarily suffice to improve their social mobility. The paper also looks into the policy's implicated challenges for curriculum planning and design faced by CL teachers, and recommend that policy reviews be carried out based on recent demographic shifts and classroom realities to better equip EM students' CL proficiency, so as to increase their employability, smoother social integration into Hong Kong society, and to resolve the intergenerational poverty.

Teachers for Immigrant Students: A Systematic Literature Review Across Hong Kong, Turkey, and the United States

“…Our review revealed to a greater extent examples of language perceived as a critical gap separating immigrant students from learning and from their teachers, and as a gap separating teachers from effectively teaching. This was evident in HK, where ethnic minorities’ lack of mastery of Chinese (Cantonese and Putonghua) or standard English detrimentally affects their school performance (Gu, 2018; Shum et al, 2018) and social mobility (Loh & Tam, 2016). Researchers in Turkey (Aydin & Kaya, 2017; Aykırı, 2017) documented teachers’ inability to communicate with refugee students or their parents because of language barriers, exacerbated further by the shortage of sufficiently trained teachers who can instruct immigrant students.…”

Translanguaging as a social justice strategy: the case of teaching Chinese to ethnic minority students in Hong Kong

“…Many underprivileged South Asians are limited to low-paid service jobs that require them to be proficient in the local vernacular to communicate with most working-class people in Hong Kong (Lai, 2010 ). As a minoritized group, they are expected to be assimilated into mainstream Chinese society by studying Chinese to achieve a social class upgrade (Loh & Tam, 2016 ). In contrast, their wealthier white counterparts have the privilege of thriving in Hong Kong as monolingual English speakers who receive elite English-medium education in fee-paying international schools where Cantonese-speaking is discouraged or even disallowed on campus.…”

“…Their conclusion was that poor Chinese teaching was to blame (Wang, 2019 ). In the past decade or so, Chinese language education, its pedagogy, assessment methods, and teachers have been frequently criticized by researchers and the news media for the academic failures of Hong Kong’s ethnic minority students (Loh & Tam, 2016 ; Shum et al, 2011 ; Tsung & Gao, 2012 ; Tsung & Lau, 2019 ). Bhowmik and Kennedy ( 2017 ) found that it has been “common to attribute school failure for ethnic minority students in Hong Kong to problems with Chinese language education” (p. 69).…”

Lexical Orthographic Knowledge Mediates the Relationship Between Character Reading and Reading Comprehension Among Learners With Chinese as a Second Language

“…These students attend local kindergartens and primary/secondary schools but mostly take Chinese as a second language. Consequently, their reading proficiency significantly lags behind their Chinese counterparts for about 3–4 years, which largely undermines their confidence in Chinese language learning and in turn hinders their academic achievements, social integration and upward social mobility ( Leong et al, 2011 ; Loh and Tam, 2016 ). To address the pressing need, teachers and researchers have been seeking effective and tailor-made approaches derived from empirical evidence about CSL students’ characteristics in learning Chinese ( Gong et al, 2020b ).…”