Trilingual education in Hong Kong primary schools: an overview Author Wang, Lixun, Kirkpatrick, Andy Published 2015 Journal Title Multilingual Education Version Version of Record (VoR) DOI https://doi.org/10.1186/s13616-015-0023-8 Copyright Statement © 2015 Wang and Kirkpatrick; licensee Springer. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. Downloaded from http://hdl.handle.net/10072/141854 Griffith Research Online https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au Wang and Kirkpatrick Multilingual Education (2015) 5:3 DOI 10.1186/s13616-015-0023-8 RESEARCH Open Access Trilingual education in Hong Kong primary schools: an overview Lixun Wang1* and Andy Kirkpatrick2 * Correspondence:
[email protected] 1The Hong Kong Institute of Abstract Education, Hong Kong, China Full list of author information is Hong Kong is linguistically complex and diverse with three principal languages: available at the end of the article Cantonese, English and Putonghua. A substantial debate on the language policies governing the three principal languages has continued for more than two decades among policy-makers and educators. The political transition in 1997 has greatly affected Hong Kong society, including language education. Since then, the HKSAR government has made a series of language policy reforms trying to create a reasonable balance among the three languages in Hong Kong. The policies of ‘biliteracy and trilingualism’ and ‘mother-tongue teaching’ are two of the most significant in terms of controversy and impact.