Sign in or register
for additional privileges

How to Know Hong Kong and Macau

Roberto Ignacio Diaz, Dominic Cheung, Ana Paulina Lee, Authors

You appear to be using an older verion of Internet Explorer. For the best experience please upgrade your IE version or switch to a another web browser.

Macau: Language in Secondary School

Unlike British Government, the Portuguese Government did not enforce strictly Portuguese teaching in schools. Only those who wish to work in the government and in the court were required to know Portuguese. According to Professor Cheung, the local Chinese people do not interact with Portuguese that much into learning their languages.Post-Handover era after 1999 has not changed the education system significantly, either, because the last updated of guidance for language of instruction was published in 1998. Secondary schools can choose among Chinese (must include Mandarin),Portuguese and English as the instruction language. And they can also choose from the three to fulfill the requirement of foreign language. In the global context, English is a more widely used language so Portuguese does not gain the same importance. There is only one Portuguese school right now with secondary education, Escola Portuguesa de Macau

As for English, according to Amanda Conklin, a Fulbright teaching assistant at Macau Polytechnic who has conduct a survey-based research on the English education in Macau,there is no formal government policy towards English education in primary and secondary schools. Thus, the schools themselves have designed their own curricula, which aren't necessarily founded on sound English teaching practices. Most schools start ESL classes in first grade, and it has replaced Portuguese as the leading foreign language taught in schools.While Universities in Macau are supposed to offer all their degree programs with English or both English and Cantonese as the medium of instruction, the majority of the students she surveyed felt that the English language education they received in their primary and secondary schools had not equipped them with the level of proficiency they needed to engage at the university level.  his results in many students having to go through remedial English courses before being allowed to enroll in regular university courses.In Macau 2020, The document noted the growing importance of English, especially when compared to the decreasing importance of Portuguese to all aspects of Macau life, with the exception of government administration, and called for steps to emphasize English education. However, the Macau government has yet to respond with a clear, defined policy on what English education means in Macau. But there are a number of English secondary schools and secondary schools with English section in Macauļ¼Œsuch as Collegio de St.Rosa de Lima.

Therefore the Macau Government's emphasis on triliterate and quadrilingual abilities seems somewhat hard to achieve in practice. Here is another difference from Hong Kong.
Comment on this page
 

Discussion of "Macau: Language in Secondary School"

Add your voice to this discussion.

Checking your signed in status ...

Previous page on path Multilingualism in Hong Kong and Macau (After 1997), page 7 of 9 Next page on path