English as an academic language has always been an ocean of uncertainty for multilingual students across the Asia Pacific who are thrown into it often without their consent. This can result in a state of confusion and at worst, chaos in the many languages and multicultural identities they inhabit. This chapter seeks to unravel some of these historical factors over the past 25 years. It reviews the available wisdom around systemic functional linguistics and the theoretical foundations provided by experts of language and learning such as Cummins and Halliday. IB support programmes offer solutions to multilingual students for whom even the most well-intentioned IB schools in the Asia Pacific create dilemmas. There is a case for IB support programmes to bring together student well-being, as an affirmation and exploration of their cross-cultural identities. Finally, it suggests an update and further applications of the excellent support document called Language and Learning in IB Programmes to suit the realities of a new decade in the Asia-Pacific region.
TopIntroduction
In May 2020, there were 5,284 IB world schools across 158 countries offering 7,002 IB Primary Years, Middle Years and Diploma Programmes, according to the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO). Of these, 1,444 schools were situated in the Asia-Pacific region. Many students across these schools are multilingual and access an IB Programme in a language other than their native or heritage language. They come to an International Baccalaureate education because it is the most aspirational course of study that an ambitious parent can select. It is usually expensive and desirable in its possibilities for access to international tertiary education and employment. IB programmes are usually taught in pedagogical settings that are sufficiently different from national or state curricula to be intriguing, if not always well understood. Parents who are socially and economically upwardly mobile are willing to risk investing in an education that might yield rich returns in the future. It is therefore worth investigating how students for whom English is a second, third or additional academic language fare through this rigorous international programme. It is also worth understanding the forces and pressures that caused IB Programmes to come to be the curricula of choice in Hong Kong.
In 1996, colonial Hong Kong was about to be handed over to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Hong Kong had a smattering of international schools following the British National Curriculum, culminating in A-Level or IGCSE examinations. There was talk in 1996 that ‘internationalising’ was perhaps an inevitable and important outcome of the late 20th century and that it was time ‘to go global.’ How this was to be achieved with an emerging multilingual, multicultural population buffeted by globalization was unclear at that time. In this paper, the role of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) in this educational paradigm shift is the subject of discussion.
Towards the end of the school year in 1996, British schools which were internationalising in Hong Kong understood that their traditional clientele was declining. This mainly consisted of expatriate army and business parents, American, British and Australian corporate personnel, and British-educated people from subcontinental Asia. Despite being culturally diverse, this population did not have significant language needs in English as a medium of instruction. This decline had been forecast to continue throughout 1997 due to economic and political uncertainties surrounding Hong Kong’s return. Economic doom and gloom was predicted.
From 1997 to about 2002, Hong Kong became home to a new population of families and their children who entered ‘internationalising’ schools. They represented a diversity that could not be easily classified. They were upwardly mobile families who were starting new businesses reliant on the PRC’s manufacturing prowess, and Chinese families who dared to break traditional schooling habits. There were the children of parents who had suffered at the hands of a rigorous Anglo-Chinese convent education or British boarding schools where caning had been the norm from the 1950s to the 1980s. They were determined to spare their children these traumas. Additionally, there were the children of the sub-continent (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh), whose parents were corporate professionals.
There were also families moving into Hong Kong from the rest of Southeast Asia: Thai, Japanese, Korean, Malaysian, Indonesian, Singaporean and overseas or returning Mainland Chinese. Their children shared one characteristic that unified them, stripping them of the rich socio-cultural diversity that marked the languages, values and belief systems of their countries of origin. Their ‘native’ English speaking teachers could agree on only one thing: these children had poor English. Despite being keen students, these young people generally had undeveloped academic literacy skills in English.
These students did have difficulties with academic English but they were able to watch English sitcoms, mouth the lyrics of popular western music and even rap. The academic English they struggled with was textbook English, weekly assessments and final examinations. This academic language is referred to as Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency ‘CALP’. Cummins (2000, p.69) defines academic language as “the ability to make complex meanings explicit in either oral or written modalities by means of language itself rather than by means of contextual or paralinguistic cues (e.g. gestures, intonation, etc.)”. Therefore, CALP also includes the language of polite school parlance about homework deadlines, completion of assignments and coursework, and internal assessment versus external assessment.