According to this ‘late immersion’ model for students aged 11–12 at secondary level, every year about 30 percent of the primary school leavers are allocated to an EMI school. Stringent requirements must be met before a school could claim to be an EMI school. Driven by the twin principles of monolingual English-medium instruction (EMI) and ‘no language mixing allowed’, secondary schools are divided into two streams. Designed with essentially Cantonese-dominant Hongkongers in mind, the TaB policy consists of many measures, with the ‘medium of instruction streaming policy’ introduced since September 1998 being the most controversial. ![]() After being implemented for over two decades, however, there are signs that most students’ language standards in Chinese and English fall short of the TaB target, as measured by the public examination results of successive generations of secondary school leavers. Through free education and language support measures in school, students are expected to be conversant in English and Putonghua in addition to Cantonese, and be able to read and understand written Chinese and English. Hong Kong’s ‘trilingual and biliterate’ language policy (TaB, 三語兩文) is almost as old as the special administrative region (SAR) itself.
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