This paper discusses findings of an ongoing three-year ethnography of language policy which examines language policy appropriation in an elite private bilingual school established in postcolonial Hong Kong. The research site is an International Baccalaureate (IB) school that teaches through Putonghua and English while the majority of students come from local Cantonese-speaking (and often bilingual) families and the teachers are predominantly monolingual ‘native-speakers’. As the school sought international certification for ‘global citizenship’ (CIS 2017), an English teacher took the opportunity to initiate a Cantonese poetry translation project that led students to reflect on their linguistic identity and practices.
Ricento and Hornberger (1996) offered the metaphor of language planning and policy (LPP) as a multi-layered onion to uncover the agentive processes of creating, interpreting and enacting language policy. An analysis of the artefacts of the school and the project, as well as of the related interview data reveals how an experienced English teacher stirred the onion by negotiating the paradox of ‘global citizen’ and marginalisation of the local Cantonese language in the school. Agentive (re)interpretation of top-down language policy has opened up spaces for counter-discourses that enact multilingual education (Hornberger 2013, Johnson 2010). Interview data from students helps us understand how their differing levels of engagement with Cantonese and Cantonese-English translation within and outside school could have implications on the development of their identities and investment in learning (Norton 2014).
CIS (Council of International Schools) (2017). School Development & Global Citizenship Certification. http://www.cois.org/page.cfm?p=2298. Accessed 30 August 2017.
Hornberger, N.H. (2013). Negotiating methodological rich points in the ethnography of language policy. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 219, 101-122.
Johnson, D. C. (2010). Implementational and ideological spaces in bilingual education language policy. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 13 (1), 61-79.
Norton, B. (2014). Identity, literacy and the multilingual classroom. In S. May (ed.) The Multilingual Turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and Bilingual Education, 103-122. New York: Routledge.
Ricento, T., & Hornberger, N.H. (1996). Unpeeling the onion: Language planning and policy and the ELT professional. TESOL Quarterly, 30(3), 401-427.
