WP139 Bilingual education in Hong Kong: History, challenges & directions for research

The field of bilingual education in Hong Kong provides a perfect window for studying transformations of education within wider processes of economic, institutional, political, sociolinguistic and cultural change. As Hong Kong changed from a former British colony to a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People?s Republic of China, the space of language education has seen the overlapping of old and new ideas about what languages should be learned or taught, by whom, when and to what degree. Such ideas, and the policies which have contributed to their institutionalisation, cannot be detached from shifting conditions affecting who gets to decide what language repertoires are attributed value in which sociolinguistic markets, within local and trans-local destabilizations of the modern politics of language and culture.? This paper traces major works that have described these processes, attending to their implications for existing language-in-education policies and practices in contemporary Hong Kong.