English Proficiency as a class indicator

While Hong Kong proclaimed itself as a multilingual city with two official languages, English has always been perceived as the language of the higher class, where one can often infer other’s social class from their English proficiencies and accents. This phenomenon, while depressing, exposes the intricate working of language proficiency and status, thence levitates a battlefield for class differentiation, outside of size, price and location of one’s house.

Hong Kong’s traditional English education places heavy emphasis on learning the structural rule of English, the grammars, the sentence patterns and fundamental vocabularies through memorisation and repetition, with knowledge enforced onto students with the ruler of humiliation. It’s undeniable that a solid grasp of these concepts are essential to facilitate the development of English ability, yet the frustration brings about by the use of public mortification plants the seed of irrational fear towards the language itself, which ultimately resulted in the paralysis of learning, owing to the association of shame and English, actualised by the distinct red ink and name calling.

As the result of the system’s defective nature, a child’s English proficiency becomes highly dependent on the household’s class, since parents’ attitude towards English is found to be strongly influenced by their education levels (Social Class and Language Attitudes in Hong Kong, 2010), attributed to the societal consensus that fluency in English reflects education level, intellectual ability and class level. Interestingly, while most middle class parents understand the importance of the language, they approach learning differently from upper middle class, in the way that they choose to immerse their children in the language itself, through books, cartoons and movies in combination of tutoring, rather than the endless spiral of torture. The differentiation here is the realisation that true cultivation is often organic and self-sufficient, where one absorbs and digests information on its own, instead of spoon feeding one with the bitter medicine of Grammar practices and meaningless exercises. In other words, parents from a higher social class tend to fathom the cultural aspect of a language, rather than the functional only.