- 7 -
Starting in 1994. parents of primary 6 students were provided with information on the language ability of their children, grouped according to their proficiency in Chinese and English. Schools have since been categorised into three groups as follows:
(a) schools which should use Chinese as their medium of instruction;
(b) schools which may use either Chinese or English as their medium of instruction; and
(c) schools which may use Chinese or English for some classes and should use Chinese only for other classes as their medium of instruction.
At the same time, the Education Department has been promoting robustly the benefits of mother-tongue teaching by:
(i) publicising the results of research studies undertaken in conjunction with Hong Kong University and Chinese University of Hong Kong between 1987 and 1994 on using mother tongue as the medium of instruction. These studies indicated that students generally learned and performed better with mother tongue as the medium of instruction, particularly in language-loaded subjects. Abstracts of these results have been distributed to all kindergartens, primary and secondary schools. Video tapes have also been produced. Starting from 1995, such information is also given, in the form of pamphlets, to all parents of Primary 6 students who will have to choose secondary schools for their children;
(ii) producing posters for schools to display during parents' days;
(iii) holding roving exhibitions on Government's medium of instruction policy
and findings of the relevant research studies; and
(iv) organising seminars on the effectiveness of mother-tongue teaching for
secondary school heads.
As a result of these efforts, the number of schools adopting Chinese as the medium of instruction for all subjects except English has increased from 52 in 1994 to 69 this year. In fact, some 280 secondary schools or about 70% of all the secondary schools use Chinese as the medium of instruction to varying degrees. Of these, some 150 schools use Chinese for most of the school subjects.