Abstract

Hong Kong’s educational landscape has been shifting to include Non-Chinese Speaking (NCS) students in public and government subsidized schools. Policies surrounding language of instruction, curricula and literacy practices have involved a negotiation of power, space, and belonging for Hong Kong’s NCS ethnic minority population. The thesis explores how secondary school is experienced by NCS students, facilitated by the teachers of NCS students, and designed by policy makers through the discourse of Hong Kong’s Education Bureau (EDB). By obtaining a post-structuralist theoretical framework (Foucault, 1980; Bourdieu, 1989, 1991; Bell & Russell, 2000; Robinson-Pant, 2001), and through in-depth interviews, and an analysis of the EDB’s printed materials this study suggests that 1) Non-Chinese Speaking students’ experiences of school do not align with the discourse of Hong Kong’s Education Bureau, and 2) that the experience of the category of “Non-Chinese Speaking” is problematic as it refers to much more than students’ Chinese language skills. The findings from this study suggest that the current practice of schooling NCS students requires a rethink, as the experience of the category of “Non-Chinese Speaking” leads students to develop ideas about their exclusion from the community, which directly impacts their ideas about what it means to be a citizen of Hong Kong.