English Language Teaching in its Social Context

274 ANGEL M. Y. LIN21, 1998). Besides, English remains the mcdium of instruction in most universities andprofessional training programmes.It can be seen that the symbolic market is embodied and enacted in the many keysituations (e.g., educational and job settings) in which symbolic resources (e.g., certain typesof linguistic skills, cultural knowledge, specialized knowledge and skills) are demanded ofsocial actors if they want to gain access to valuablc social, educational and eventually materialresources (Bourdieu, 199 1). For instance, a Hong Kong student must have adequate Englishresources to cnter and succeed in the English-mcdium professional training programmesand in order to earn the qualifications to entcr high-income professions.To see how the larger social context can pose local dilemmas on teachers and studentsand how they can exercise their creative discursive agency in dcaling with their dilemmas,let us compare and contrast four different classrooms.4 A story of four classroomsTaken from the database of the author’s ethnographic and classroom discourse study of eightclassrooms in scven schools from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds in Hong Kong, thefollowing four classroom scenarios arc meant to give the reader a sense of the diversity ofdiscursive practices that can bc found across even similarly constrained classrooms (e.g.,Classrooms R, C, and D). To protect the anonymity of the schools and the participants, allnames are pseudo-names and all identifying details of the schools and teachcrs are left out.In listening to these very different stories, however, you will sense a prcoccupation with arecurrent question: To what extent arc classroom participants shaped by thc larger socialstructures such as sociocultural and familial background and to what extent arc they freeto transform their lot (and habitus)? We shall return to this question in section 5. For cachclassroom I shall first describe the background, with information based on questionnairesurveys and interviews ofthe students, and then an English reading lesson. All four teachersare Hong Kong Chinese, sharing the samc mother-tongue with their students.Classroom A: a scenario ?fcompatihle habitusBackgroundThis is a form 3 (grade 9) class of thirty-three students, aged from fourteen to fifteen, in aprestigious girls’ school. The majority of the students came from families in the expensiveresidential area in which the school is located. Their parents were professionals, businessexecutives, or university professors, whose education level ranged from secondary,university, to postgraduate. They spoke mostly Cantonese at home, but sometimes alsoEnglish, for example, when speaking to their Filipino domestic hclpcrs.They read a varietyof extra-curricular materials, including both English and Chinese, both serious and nonseriousmaterials; for example, comics, Chinesc newspapers, English ncwspapers, Englishfashion magazines, English detective stories, science fiction, pop youth magazines,TV news,Rcadcr’s Digest (both English and Chinesc editions), and Chinese translations of foreignclassics (c.g., Gone with the Wind). The students were fluent in their responses to theteacher’s questions and could claboratc their answers with the teacher’s prompts.Teacher A’s English was the best among the eight teachers who participated in my study.English seemed to be a tool she readily used in her daily life and not just in academiccontexts. She spoke to her students about her daughter, her shopping habits, Mother’s Day,