English as medium of instruction - II

In the classroom

It is no secret that the English competence of an average HK secondary school student is inadequate to learn the curriculum in English. However, to satisfy parental demands of using English as the medium of instruction, schools has been silently allowing teachers who were supposed to teach in English, to use Cantonese to supplement teaching - this supplementation could sometimes be a whole session conducted in Cantonese.

In fact, this (using Cantonese to conduct a lesson teaching material in a textbook written in English) certainly improved the understanding of students despite being rather unsound pedagogically. The problem with it though, is that, should we still label these as "EMI" schools? "EMI" subjects?

The situation of the pseudo-EMI teaching in secondary school has not been studied thoroughly, the obvious reason being that teachers will usually revert to teaching in English when being observed. What comes to rescue, though, is studies conducted among university students in Hong Kong.

Braine and McNaught had a fairly well-written literature review of the pseudo-EMI teaching in Hong Kong in their paper entitled "Adaptation of the ‘Writing Across Curriculum’ Model to the Hong Kong Context" [1]. In essence, in the university, students pressure the lecturers to use Cantonese by simply not responding to lecturers who still teach with English.

We can see that the outcome associated with teaching in English in these students whose competence do not enable them or facilitate them to learn in English is that - they will simply NOT learn the subject, and the outcome associated with teaching in Cantonese in these students would be that their English couldn't improve. The issue lies on:

(1) Are we doing an adequate job in placing students into correct MOI group?
  ... are we trying to put too many students in EMI schools?
  ... could this be due to parental demands?
(2) Is it possible to setup a category so that English textbooks are taught in lessons conducted in Cantonese?
(3) What is wrong with the current English education in HK?

[1] http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/clear/download/paper/BMcN_Lui.pdf