Grounding in Cantonese will help ethnic minorities learn Chinese
David Li says to be really effective, a Chinese-language curriculum for ethnic minorities must take account of the way the language is learned
The government's decision to set aside HK$200 million in the next academic year to support the development of a curriculum of Chinese as a second language is a welcome move.
It remains unclear, however, what kind of support measures are being explored, and whether they address ethnic minority students' learning difficulties adequately, especially in written Chinese.
Referring to ethnic minorities, the policy address said that, "to integrate into the community and develop their careers, they must improve their ability to listen to, speak, read and write Chinese". This gives the impression that the Chinese language is the same across the four skills. It is ambiguous, to say the least.
Listening and speaking are done in Cantonese, whereas reading and writing, taught in Cantonese, require students to acquire vocabulary and grammar grounded in Putonghua. Research has shown that the successful decoding of hundreds of non-alphabetic Chinese characters is not easy for first- or second-language learners alike. It is the main cause of ethnic minority students' linguistic predicament.
A recent study of the linguistic perceptions and language-learning experiences of 15 South Asian undergraduate students (including four from the Philippines), at the Hong Kong Institute of Education, found that the methods for teaching written Chinese were far from efficient and effective. Some students compared their experience of composing Chinese characters with drawing pictures, which, according to their teachers, could only be learned through rote learning and frequent practice. They found Chinese characters difficult to learn and easy to forget.
Worse, a failure to pronounce those characters accurately in Cantonese was a frequent source of frustration. The majority had to put up with embarrassment and sometimes humiliation when the mispronunciation led to laughter, causing bitterness and damage to their self-esteem, dampening any motivation to practise using Cantonese.
