P R E S S   R E L E A S E

Professor Anne O Yue, Professor of Chinese Language and Linguistics at the Department of Asian Languages and Literature, University of Washington, will give a public lecture on "Language Education in Hong Kong in the Twenty-First Century" at The Chinese University of Hong Kong on 26 October 1999.  Professor Yue will outline in her lecture how Hong Kong can implement trilingual education in a mutually profitable way to meet the new challenge she faces in the twenty-first century.

Hong Kong has been blessed with the tradition of bilingual education in Chinese and English. After returning to China, will Mandarin replace Cantonese and English as the official and standard language?  Professor Yue argues the advantage of bilingualism in Hong Kong is not shared in other regions of China and Hong Kong should consider trilingualism as a further advantage.  To have more than one official language and more than one standard language may have positive value from a global perspective. Many educators consider mother tongue the most effective medium for education, the basic tool for absorbing knowledge besides language, and the foundation for learning other media in search of knowledge.  However, Professor Yue points out that, in fact, several successful multilingual education models in Europe and America serve to illustrate that using two non-native languages as educational medium neither adversely affect the learning of the native language nor the learning of academic subjects (mathematics, natural sciences, social sciences). Professor Yue asserts that from the experience of other countries and with her rich experience in bilingual education, Hong Kong can devise a new educational module that is both practicable and amenable to the local international environment.

Having graduated from the University of Hong Kong, Professor Yue pursued her graduate studies in linguistics in the United States and obtained her M.A. degree from the University of Texas in Austin and her Ph.D. degree from the Ohio State University.  From 1968 through 1978, she served as a research staff member at Princeton University, the Research Institute of Asian and African Languages and Cultures of Tokyo, Japan, and the University of California at Berkeley. She taught at Pomona College in California from 1978 to 1980, and joined the faculty of the University of Washington in 1980.

Professor Yue is the current President of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics, 1999-2000.  Her broad research interests comprise dialectology (syntax, phonology), grammar (diachronic, synchronic), linguistic change, linguistic typology, areal linguistics, and field work (she has investigated over thirty Chinese dialects -- including Yue,Southern Min, Hakka, Wu, and Northern --  as well as some Zhuang and Tibeto-Burman languages).

The Public Lecture by Wilson Wong -- New Method College Visiting Professor in Language Education will take place on Tuesday, 26 October 1999 at 5:30 pm in Lecture Theatre 1, 7/F, Mong Man Wai Building, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.  The lecture will be conducted in Cantonese.  All are welcome.