Introduction

The topic of medium of instruction (MOI) has long been an important site of contestation in Hong Kong. Owing to its high socioeconomic status and its gate-keeping function in higher education, Englishmedium instruction (EMI) has been keenly sought after by parents for their children since the 1980s. Indeed, English was widely adopted as the medium of instruction in secondary schools despite the fact that Chinese was granted the status of an official language in 1974. In 1960, for example, only 57.9% of the secondary schools in Hong Kong were English-medium schools, but by 1980, 87.7% of them had adopted English as their MOI (Bray & Koo, 2004 ).

In 1978, the introduction of compulsory nine-year education in Hong Kong meant that many students who formerly could not enter secondary schools were receiving their education in EMI schools. In these EMI schools many teachers adopted a bilingual approach in which they switched between Chinese (practised as spoken Cantonese and written Standard Chinese), the home languages of the students, and English, their L2, because many students were not capable of learning through English alone. This approach was regarded by the Hong Kong government as unproductive, and in 1998 the government adopted a linguistic streaming policy which allowed only 114 secondary schools to use EMI in their junior forms (Forms 1–3; equivalent to Grades 7–9), whereas the rest of the schools (about 70%) had to change to Chinese-medium instruction (CMI) in their junior forms (schools still retain their autonomy to choose the medium of instruction for senior forms). This policy, however, met with a great deal of opposition, mainly from parents who believed that this practice only deepened the stigmatization of Chinese-medium schools by suggesting that they were for the less competent, and who wanted access to EMI for the sake of their children's future jobs and the higher educational opportunities it afforded them. Amidst political pressure, a fine-tuned MOI policy was implemented by the government in September 2010.

The fine-tuned MOI policy for secondary schools

Since September 2010, many CMI schools have chosen to change the medium of instruction of one or two of their academic subjects (usually science or mathematics), or some percentage of the lessons of each of their academic subjects, from CMI to EMI, also because of strong parental demand for English for their children.

Introduction

The term ‘translanguaging’ has recently been taken up by many researchers of multilingualism as an encompassing term for a variety of multilingual practices, traditionally termed as code-switching, code-mixing, borrowing and crossing, which are commonplace amongst multilingual language users. It has served as a corrective of the still widespread perception that such practices are somehow out of the ordinary, abnormal or deviant, by highlighting the positive and creative dimensions of the practices (see a review in García & Li Wei, 2014 ). In this chapter, I will examine the translanguaging practices of children of immigrant background in a specific socio-educational context as evidence of their creativity, criticality and multicompetence. The group of children I am focusing on in this chapter are those of Chinese ethnic origin in Britain. They are best described as transnationals: most of them are British-born, but many are of immigrant background, that is, their parents were born outside Britain; some of them have lived in other parts of the world. The specific context that I am studying is that of complementary schools, a voluntary education provision made available by minority ethnic, usually immigrant, communities in Britain to support their children's learning and use of the ethnic languages. Through a detailed analysis of classroom exchanges amongst the pupils and their teachers, I want to argue that translanguaging has a transformative capacity, as it creates a social space for the multilingual language user by bringing together different dimensions of their personal history, experience and environment, their attitude, belief and ideology, their cognitive and physical capacity into one coordinated and meaningful performance, thereby making it into a lived experience. I have called this space ‘translanguaging space’, a space for the act of translanguaging as well as a space created through translanguaging (Li Wei, 2011 ). As we will see through the examples of the pupils’, and their teachers’, alternation between languages and between modes of communication (e.g. speaking and writing), the complementary schools for minority ethnic children in Britain provide just such a translanguaging space. Skills, knowledge and identities are acquired and developed through the act of translanguaging.

Introduction

English learners (ELs), particularly those from Hispanic backgrounds, represent one of the fastest-growing populations in the US public school system. The number of Latino students nearly doubled between 1990 and 2006, accounting for 60% of the total growth in public school enrolments over that period. Currently, 20% of the students attending US public schools are of Hispanic origin, and projections recently released by the US Census Bureau suggest that by 2050 there will be more Latino students in US public schools than those of European descent (Fry & Gonzales, 2008 ).

Despite the fact that the vast majority of the Latino K-12 students are US born, Spanish-speaking ELs lag behind native English speakers of the same age in text-level reading skills, and this puts them at risk of academic failure (August et al., 2005 ). As shown by results from the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 39% of eighth-grade (ages 13–14) Latino students scored below the basic level in reading (Mather & Foxen, 2010 ). Raising the educational attainment of the fastest-growing segment of the population will be vital to the overall economic future and prosperity of the United States and as such should be a priority for education policy-makers.

While ELs exhibit word-level reading skills comparable to their English-only peers, their reading comprehension skills, which are necessary to master school work beyond third grade (ages 8–9) and have access to economic opportunity, are significantly lower (August & Shanahan, 2006 ). Differences in the reading performance of ELs and English native speakers begin to increase around Grade 4 or 5 (ages 10–11) when children transition from ‘learning to read’ to ‘reading to learn’, and these seem to be related to vocabulary and conceptual knowledge (Chall, 1983 ). Research on the acquisition of first language reading skills has demonstrated a strong relationship between knowledge of word meaning and ability to comprehend passages containing those words (Anderson & Freebody, 1981 ). In fact, the proportion of difficult words in a text has been found to be the single most powerful predictor of text difficulty, and a reader's general vocabulary knowledge the single best predictor of how well the reader can understand text (Anderson & Freebody, 1981 ).