New System, New Language, New School: Chee Wai-chi on Hong Kong's Teenage Migrants

Every year in Hong Kong about 5,000 newly-arrived children enter local primary and secondary schools. The majority are from mainland China and South Asia and they are often disadvantaged from the outset in a system based on knowledge of Cantonese and English, and teaching to the norm.

That situation concerns Dr Chee Wai-chi of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, who recently received a GRF grant to investigate the academic trajectory and social integration of teenage migrants in Hong Kong’s school system.

“My research interest has always been young people and education,” she said. “I think migrant students deserve our attention because they are in a difficult situation where they have to adjust to a new life on the one hand, and a very unfamiliar education system on the other.”

Migrant students have long been known to have disproportionately lower academic achievement in local schools. While Mainland students have a somewhat easier time because of the similarity of Cantonese and Putonghua, they struggle with English. Indian and to a certain extent Nepali students cope with English but struggle with Chinese. Pakistani students tend to struggle with both.

Dr Chee saw some of this in an earlier project on the initial experiences of migrant students that ran from 2008 to 2012. She interviewed 87 students aged 12 to 18 during their first year in Hong Kong and found many were optimistic – not necessarily for the best reasons.

“They compared their Hong Kong school with their hometown school and talked about the schools here being well-equipped with things like computers, air-conditioners and sports facilities, and the teaching quality being higher. Most of them said the teachers here were more professional than the teachers back home.

“I called this misguided optimism because their comparisons were based on their hometown rather than the Hong Kong context and other local peers,” she said.

Dr Chee will now go back to the same group for a comparative longitudinal study to see how they view things now that they are older and have gone further through the school system. Did they catch up in the curriculum and if so when, or did they drop out and if so why? Did they feel they belonged to Hong Kong and if so, at what point did that happen? For mainland students, did anti-mainland sentiment affect their educational decisions? These are some of the issues she will explore.

“I’m trying to see this from their perspective and reveal their experiences. If we understand what these students are going through, then we will be in a better position to provide effective support to them,” she said.

She hopes the results will contribute to better practices and policies based on equity and the integration of migrant students, so they do not flounder in Hong Kong’s educational system. Hong Kong itself could even benefit. “Ironically, Hong Kong claims to be a world city and inclusive,” she said. “If that is really so, then we should be helping these students to do better.”

See the original article in Arts Faculty Newsletter Winter 2015.