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Motivation and Objectives
Why We Are Interested?
With remarkably fast growing development of Madrasah schools (i.e. for Islamic religious instruction) to accommodate the sharp rising Islamic population (i.e. from 1.1% in 1999 to 3.11% in 2011) in Hong Kong, we find it interesting to scrutinize the present situation to figure out the effect of learning environment on Islamic students’ identity construction in Hong Kong.
Our group would like to compare the sense of identity of two groups of Islamic secondary school students - students studying at Islamic schools and students studying at local schools, given their language use in this study is primarily different. Apart from this, many Islamic schools would teach the students to remain faithful to the Islamic tradition by studying and memorising Quran at Islamic schools after daytime schooling while local schools offer no or other religious education.
While we are aware of the fact that one’s learning environment is not restricted to schools alone, we would like to focus on how the differences in academic environment can influence one’s language acquisition as well as identity construction. Interviews will be conducted to get a general attitude of how the students view their sense of belonging, as well as an in-depth reflection on their identity construction and possible transformation.
More About the Pakistani Community in Hong Kong
According to the 2011 population by-census, among the 451, 000 ethnic minorities settling in Hong Kong which constitutes around 6% of the whole of population, Pakistanis are the 5th largest group with 18, 042 living here (Census and Statistics Department, 2013). The major reasons for them to settle in Hong Kong, especially in the early history of Hong Kong, can be categorized into the following: military service, labor, trade and the need for government clerk (Erni and Leung, 2014). Nowadays, there is also a high proportion of them born in Hong Kong.
Yet their presence, or their effort in integrating into the society, seems always to go unnoticed by the majority of Hong kongers. It has been a myth that most Hong kongers assume foreigners equal westerners – that is they can speak English perfectly well. And some further presuppose that since these “foreigners” can speak fluent English, they should find their path to integrate into this bilingual society an easy one. Such oversimplification arguably illustrates our ignorance of the real situation that most minorities in Hong Kong are facing. In the case of Pakistanis, in fact, most of them speak Urdu which is described as "Mandarin for Chinese people" by one of our informants, coupled with their mother tongue or dialects from their homeland like Patwari. They do not necessarily speak good English, let alone Cantonese or Mandarin, which are essential in terms of language competency to live in Hong Kong.
More pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of Pakistani community can be seen and assembled after we have conducted our research.
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