Abstract
With the growing needs of internationalization in tertiary education in Hong Kong, there are increasing numbers of students from different parts of the world studying in The Chinese University of Hong Kong. English language is one of the official working languages among students and teachers within the university. Cantonese language education is needed for academic work as well as for cultural pursuit in Hong Kong for non-local students and exchange students. Communication skills in Cantonese language can help non-local students and exchange students better integrate into university life and study. These skills also help foster academic and cultural exchange between local and non-local students. As a matter of fact, there are hundreds of non-local students studying Cantonese at university level each semester (including summer semester). This project intends to start build up the first and unique Cantonese learners’ corpus so that language teachers can track the linguistic and/or cultural difficulties of these learners. The corpus consists of Cantonese learners from different language and cultural background and will be used to analyze linguistics and paralinguistic features; such as pronunciation (including prosody), syntactic, pragmatic features; in different stages of Cantonese learning. The data extracted from the learners’ corpus can help curriculum review/design, teaching materials preparation, eLearning preparation and development of language enhancement activities. The project will also be beneficial to linguists studying language acquisition.
Brief write-up
Project objectives
With the growing needs of internationalization in tertiary education in Hong Kong, there are increasing numbers of students from different parts of the word studying in The Chinese University of Hong Kong. English language is one of the official working languages among students and teachers within the university. Cantonese language education is needed for academic work as well as for cultural pursuit in Hong Kong for non-local students and exchange students. Communication skills in Cantonese language can help non-local students and non-Chinese speaking exchange students better integrate into university life and study. These skills also help foster academic and cultural exchange between local and non-local students. As a matter of fact, there are hundreds of non-local students studying Cantonese at university level each semester (including summer semester). This project intends to start build up the first and unique Cantonese learners’ corpus so that language teachers can track the linguistic and/or cultural difficulties of these learners. The corpus consists of Cantonese learners from different language and cultural background and will be used to analyze linguistics features; such as syntactic, pragmatic features; in different stages of Cantonese learning. The data extracted from the learners’ corpus can help curriculum review/design, teaching materials preparation, eLearning preparation and development of language enhancement activities. The project will also be beneficial to linguists studying language acquisition.
Activities, process and outcomes
All the spoken data from CanSL learners has been transcribed. A learners’ corpus of about one million words is created. The corpus is analyzed and a taxonomy of linguistic features of CanSL learners is provided. A list of grammatical features of Cantonese L2 learners is ready by June 2019. The outcome can foster development of “Language education”, improve “student learning experience” by providing teachers better understanding of L2 errors and finally help “internationalization at CUHK”.
Deliverables and evaluation
- A Cantonese learners’ corpus, from students from different language and cultural background. The corpus will be for internal use at this stage and it will be useful for curriculum designers, language teachers, linguists.
- A list of common linguistic features or difficulties arranged according to learners’ language background.
- A series of workshops on departmental level to deliver significant findings and to raise effectiveness of teaching activities. The result of the project will be attempted to publish in international journals.
Dissemination, diffusion, impact and sharing of good practices
By the end of the project, workshops on departmental level will be organized to deliver significant findings and to raise effectiveness of teaching activities. The result will also be presented in international conferences to attract further collaborations. The project has been presented in local and international conference and received some positive feedback. The result will be submitted to refereed journal for publication.
