‘It has to be in a natural way’: a critical exploration of co-teaching relationships in trilingual preschool classrooms in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

Post-colonial Hong Kong is an officially trilingual city with significant numbers of residents speaking English, Cantonese, Mandarin, or some combination of all three. Competency in these languages is promoted through educational policies and practices at all levels of schooling. Using concepts from the Deweyan framework of democracy and education, this article explores relational practices among bilingual co-teachers at a private, international early years programme in Hong Kong that emphasizes democratic philosophies of learning in their efforts to promote trilingualism. Findings point to co-teachers’ interest in developing collaborative relationships, and prompting interest in additional language use through promotion of children’s interests, along with tensions they experience as they grapple with instruction in multiple languages. Findings point to a need for more nuanced understandings of co-teaching dynamics in post-colonial multilingual learning contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Early years
• trilingual
• co-teaching
• Hong Kong

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Participants in this study used both Putonghua and Mandarin to refer to the official language of the People’s Republic of China. We use both throughout this paper.

2 All names herein are pseudonyms.

3 The term "Chinese teacher" is used by the school and references the teacher's use of Cantonese, a language in the Chinese language family.

4 In most classrooms, one of the teachers (either the Chinese or Western teacher) also spoke Mandarin.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephanie C. Sanders-Smith

Stephanie C. Sanders-Smith is an assistant professor in Curriculum and instruction in the Yew Chung - Bernard Spodek Scholar in Early Childhood Education.

Liv T. Dávila

Liv T. Dávila is an associate professor in Education Policy, Organization and Leadership.