Key Concepts and Theories Origins of Monolingual Principle

Students’ Attitudes

Ethnic minority students come to CSL classrooms with prior knowledge of a diverse range of languages. According to the latest population census, among ethnic minorities aged five and above, English (44.2%) is the language most commonly spoken at home, followed by languages such as Hindi, Nepali, Punjabi and Urdu. CSL students usually have greater proficiency in English than in either Chinese or their L1, as Lai et al. (2015) found in a survey with 111 CSL minority students in a secondary school in Hong Kong. English is also the lingua franca of the entire ethnic minority community as well as the major instruction language in schools. Though some can use Chinese for general communication, many are beginning CSL learners with limited proficiency. Previous studies found that their Chinese proficiency is far from sufficient to receive monolingual Chinese teaching (Ku et al. 2005; Tsung et al. 2010). For instance, Shum et al. (2016) interviewed 18 CSL students in mainstream schools and argued that students who were overwhelmingly submerged into the monolingual Chinese environment were facing more challenging linguistic barriers.
Wang (2014) provided a questionnaire survey of CSL students’ attitudes towards language use. A total of 497 limited proficiency CSL students participated from four universities in Beijing. The Questionnaire on Students’ Language Attitudes in the Chinese as a Second Language Classroom (SLA-CSL) was developed and validated as a framework to elicit CSL students’ attitudes towards classroom language policies and practices. The study showed a significant link between their level of L2 and their need to use a supporting language. That is to say, the weaker their Chinese proficiency was, the stronger their need for a supporting language. This SLA-CSL questionnaire is a good instrument for collecting some quantitative data from CSL students in the Hong Kong context. To summarise, a good understanding of the classroom participants’ attitudes towards language policies and practices can contribute a great deal to the long-term policy planning of the CSL curriculum, as well as offering important inputs for future research on models of multilingual education for ethnic minority students in Hong Kong.