BackgroundIn February 2005, the Working Group on Review of Secondary School

Places Allocation and Medium of Instruction for Secondary Schools of the Education

Commission (教育統籌委員會檢討中一派位機制及中學教學語言工作小組)

(hereafter the Working Group) published the ‘Review of Medium of Instruction for

Secondary Schools and Secondary School Places Allocation – Consultation

Document’. In response to policies on the medium of instruction (hereafter MOI) in

secondary schools, the Support Centre for Teachers using Chinese as the Medium of

Instruction (hereafter the Centre) conducted a survey aimed at secondary schools

throughout Hong Kong to collect opinions from frontline teachers regarding the issue.

It is hoped that, by examining the current situation of schools and generalizing

schools’ experiences in adopting different MOIs, we can reflect opinions and needs of

the teachers to education policy-makers. Besides, having read teacher’s opinions in

the survey, the Centre hopes to further extend its services to provide help and support

to teachers. The extension of services was also done in 1998 and 2000 after reviewing

results of the survey completed by local secondary schools adopting Chinese as the

MOI.

Research Method

The subjects of this survey are principals and teachers. Based on the information

provided by the Education and Manpower Bureau (hereafter the EMB), we mailed the

questionnaires to all Hong Kong secondary schools, including those have adopted

Chinese as the MOI (hereafter CMI schools) and those have adopted English as the

MOI (hereafter EMI schools). The survey targeted two groups of people: school

administrators and teachers. In the end, 284 school administrators (202 from CMI

schools and 82 from EMI schools) and 2,880 teachers (2,057 from CMI schools and

823 from EMI schools) completed and returned the questionnaire. Thus a total of

3,164 questionnaires were collected. According to the information provided by the

Committee on Home-School Co-operation of the EMB (2004), there were 460 schools

in Hong Kong (346 CMI schools and 114 EMI schools) of which 334 (251 CMI

schools and 83 EMI schools) responded to our survey. The school-based response rate

of both CMI and EMI schools was 73%.

There were four types of questionnaires. ‘Questionnaire 1’ was set for administrators

of CMI schools; ‘Questionnaire 2’ for administrators of EMI schools;

‘Questionnaire3’ for teachers of CMI schools; and ‘Questionnaire 4’ for teachers of

EMI schools. School administrators include Principals, Vice Principals, Heads of

Academic Units and Subject Heads. Teachers’ questionnaires were completed by non-

language subject teachers primarily teaching Geography, History, Economics, Social

Studies, Mathematics, Science, Biology, Physics, Computer, Liberal Studies and

Integrated Humanities in the current academic year.

The questionnaire mainly inquired about the following aspects: background of

schools, background of principals and teachers, experience in adopting Chinese or

English as the MOI, opinions on the consultation document and expectations on the

MOI in Hong Kong. Below is the table of content of this survey report: