English Speakers in Hong Kong

This paper argues it is no longer possible to refer to Hong Kong English speakers en masse as EFL speakers, nor can we say they speak a fully formed new variety of English called Hong Kong English (HKE). Taking into account the language(s) used for school, for work, for entertainment, and for socializing, we can see that Hong Kong’s speech community is extremely heterogeneous, both regarding levels of English and degrees of English usage. A small but growing number of Hongkongers now report that they speak English as a native language. Hongkongers with white collar jobs have been found to write more English than Chinese while at work, making it reasonable to argue that they write English as a second language (ESL). Many Hongkongers seek out English-speaking social networks and choose to watch and listen to English-medium forms of entertainment, which means their English-speaking experience is very ESL-like. However, in addition to these variations, there are great differences in English speaking and writing abilities that correlate largely with socioeconomic status. Adding to this lack of homogeneity among English speakers is the fact that extremely few Hongkongers speak English among themselves outside of specific work or school contexts. This means that HKE is not yet a new variety of English, and will have a difficult time becoming one unless the linguistic habits of Hongkongers change. English language education should take all these individual differences into account, including potentially wide differences in the speaking, listening, reading and writing abilities among individuals themselves.

Teachers’ Feedback on a New Variety of English: The Case of Hong Kong English

The present short report reveals how teachers of English in Hong Kong (HKTEs) react to Hong Kong English (HKE). By employing a mixed method approach consisting of 100 survey responses and 28 interviews, types of feedback and activities teachers use when they encounter HKE in classroom were recorded and reported. The results showed that the two types of teachers of English – Native and Non-native English speakers – provided different kinds of responses because of the differences in attitude they held toward new varieties of English. The current study potentially sheds light on how different varieties of English could fit in traditional ESL curricula. Further research is warranted on how the feedback may affect English acquisition among Hong Kong students and whether the feedback brings positive or negative effects to the students.

Examining authenticity from an ELF perspective: the development of listening test papers in Hong Kong (1986–2018)

The present study examined the degree of situational and interactional authenticity in Hong Kong’s listening examination papers throughout the history of colonisation and globalisation (1986–2018) with reference to world Englishes and particularly English as a lingua franca (ELF) research. By means of a detailed content analysis, the evaluation of situational authenticity was based on the context of language use (e.g., speech event type, nature of interaction, identity and accent of interlocutor) in the audio samples, while the evaluation of interactional authenticity centred on the speaker’s use of communicative strategies. Our findings suggest that the speech samples generally reflected the changing situations of language use over time by increasingly adopting dialogue (rather than monologue) and locally/globally relevant language use contexts, but only included native-speaker and (from 2012) Hong Kong English accents as speech models. Despite the lack of non-standardness and speakers of different cultures in the speech samples, there were numerous instances of explicitness strategies relevant to ELF interactions throughout the sample, probably owing to the intent of the listening examination to highlight key information for the candidates. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these trends in listening paper design for the future development of English language teaching from an ELF perspective.

Linguistic democratization in HKE across registers: The effects of prescriptivism

The second half or the twentieth century witnessed the emergence and expansion of linguistic changes associated to a number of processes related to changes in socio-cultural norms, such as colloquialization, informalization and democratization. This paper focuses on the latter, a phenomenon that has been claimed to be responsible for several ongoing changes in inner-circle varieties of English, but is rather unexplored in outer-circle varieties. The paper explores Hong Kong English and studies two linguistic sets of markers that include items that represent the (old) undemocratic alternative and the (new) democratic option, namely modal must vs. semi-modals have (got) to, need (to) and want to, and epicene pronouns including undemocratic generic he, on the one hand, and democratic singular they and conjoined he or she, on the other. Using the Hong Kong component of the International Corpus of English, and adopting a register approach, the paper reaches conclusions regarding the role played by prescriptivism in the diffusion of democratic items.

Reconstructing Chinese Pidgin English phonology on the basis of written sources

"This paper is an attempt at outlining the phonology of Chinese Pidgin English, including its syllable structure, with an emphasis on the onset and the coda. Since Chinese Pidgin English is an extinct variety, the only available sources are written records such as magazine articles (e.g. in The Chinese Repository), literary works, travelogues, and letters. Reconstructing the phonology of Chinese Pidgin English on the basis of the orthography used in these sources raises the issues of the reliability of the sources and of the methodological implications. These are addressed in light of the caveats formulated by Mühlhäusler (1997), Baker and Winer (1999), Avram (2000), among others. In line with the principle of sociolinguistic accountability, all tokens in the samples of Chinese Pidgin English are included in the analysis as well as all the contexts where they might have appeared. In addition, a comparison will be made with other contemporary records of Chinese Pidgin English, with the phonology of Hong Kong English (Setter et al. 2010) and with the L2 phonology of Chinese learners of English. Such a comparison is certainly not the perfect equivalent of Rickford’s (1986) “feedback from current usage”, given that Chinese Pidgin English is no longer spoken. However, this approach is warranted by the so-called “uniformitarian principle” (Labov 1972), which posits that current patterns are similar to those that operated in the past."