Re: English Proficiency in ex British Colonies

From: Harlan Messinger (hmessinger.removethis_at_comcast.net)
Date: 03/22/05 

Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2005 20:41:44 -0500

Tutor Charles wrote:
> Why, though, is the standard of English in Hong Kong so poor when
> compared with other ex British colonies such as Singapore?
>
> What went wrong here? Is it the teaching system? The proficiency of the
> native
> Cantonese speaking English teachers that populate most of the primary
> and secondary schools?

There are at least two unspoken and non-evident premises in your
questions. First, you give Singapore as an example of an ex-colony where
the level of English competence is high, and you assume that it is so in
  other ex-British colonies in general, other than Hong Kong. Is this
true, or are you just assuming it? How does Ghana compare? Botswana? Malawi?

Second, what do you mean, "what went wrong"? Is there something wrong
with everyone *not* up and learning to speak English instead of their
own language? Unlike Britain's former African colonies and India,
consisting primarily of people who already lived there but who spoke a
number of different languages among themselves and among whom a lingua
franca was useful under collective British rule, and unlike such
colonies as the ones in the Western Hemisphere, where the British and
the people they brought with them came to overwhelm the indigenous
populations, Hong Kong was a large city with a uniformly
Cantonese-speaking population that remained a large majority throughout
British rule. So why would most of them have needed to learn English,
and why would it be "wrong" for them to have not learned it?

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