Issues in language policy and planning : summary and recommendations

In this final chapter, we will summarize our key findings and observations, with a view to making some recommendations regarding alternative language-in-education policy guidelines and support measures that will hopefully have some reference value to the education authorities and be empirically investigated. On account of various linguistic and sociolinguistic realities pertaining to the Hong Kong SAR, the envisioned thrust and purpose of the recommendations is to gain greater mileage in our deployment of energies and resources to help Hongkongers – Chinese and non-Chinese – to attain biliteracy and trilingual skills, a daunting yet arguably inescapable goalpost given the SAR’s geopolitical position and socioeconomically determined woman- and man-power needs. Specifically, eight recommendations will be presented, of which six are language policy issues, while two are related to language planning.