It is difficult for our participants to learn Cantonese. They think that the teaching method is crucial for learning the language. As our participants have mentioned that having a teacher that could speak Tagalog would be a great help. Maybe bilingual education can help them to learn Cantonese effectively. However, what is bilingual education? When the school’s language of instruction quickly changes from a minority language to majority language or the school helps children to become bilingual, the education can be called as bilingual education. There are two types of bilingual education, namely the strong version of bilingual education and weak forms of bilingual education. The strong version of bilingual education is used to describe the classrooms that teach most of subject content through two languages. Immersion bilingual education is one of the examples of strong version of bilingual education. Children are immersed in a second language and they become fluent in that language through content learning. For weak forms of bilingual educations, children are allowed to use their home language for a transitional period, and then they have to change to the majority language of the classroom. Since its ultimate goal is to move children away from their home language and only use the majority language in the classroom so it leads to relative monolingualism in the majority language.
We believe that our interviewees might have acquired better Cantonese literacy if the schools had adopted the weak forms of bilingual education to teach them Chinese. Although helping minority children to be bilinguals and be able to speak both Cantonese and their home languages fluently will be the best way of helping them to integrate into the mainstream society, it is quite impossible for a school in Hong Kong, no wonder it is a local school or an international school, to adopt the stronger form of bilingual education for all children from different minorities as the government and schools do not have such huge capital and resources to provide each minority group a bilingual education of its mother tongue and Cantonese. More importantly, people in Hong Kong generally think that being able to speak Cantonese and English will be enough to 'survive' in our society, as a result schools do not have much incentives to organize other kinds of bilingual education for minority children.
Instead, we think that the weak form of bilingual education is more feasible in Hong Kong and allowing the minority children to use their home languages to study Chinese in the early stage of their schooling can help them learn better. In fact, there are six types of week bilingual education can be chosen, including Submersion with structured immersion, Submersion with withdrawal classes, Segregationist, Transitional, Mainstream with foreign language teaching and Separatist. Within these six types of weak form bilingual education, we think that the concept of Transitional bilingual education can be a reference for schools to set up similar bilingual education to help minority children to learn Chinese. With this kind of education, minority children are allowed to use the home language for two or three years in elementary school to learn Chinese and because of the medium of instruction is their home language, they can acquire basic Cantonese vocabulary and grammar more effectively.
Reference:
Baker C. & Jones P. S. (1998) Encyclopedia of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education. Multilingual Matters Ltd.: Cleveon.
We believe that our interviewees might have acquired better Cantonese literacy if the schools had adopted the weak forms of bilingual education to teach them Chinese. Although helping minority children to be bilinguals and be able to speak both Cantonese and their home languages fluently will be the best way of helping them to integrate into the mainstream society, it is quite impossible for a school in Hong Kong, no wonder it is a local school or an international school, to adopt the stronger form of bilingual education for all children from different minorities as the government and schools do not have such huge capital and resources to provide each minority group a bilingual education of its mother tongue and Cantonese. More importantly, people in Hong Kong generally think that being able to speak Cantonese and English will be enough to 'survive' in our society, as a result schools do not have much incentives to organize other kinds of bilingual education for minority children.
Instead, we think that the weak form of bilingual education is more feasible in Hong Kong and allowing the minority children to use their home languages to study Chinese in the early stage of their schooling can help them learn better. In fact, there are six types of week bilingual education can be chosen, including Submersion with structured immersion, Submersion with withdrawal classes, Segregationist, Transitional, Mainstream with foreign language teaching and Separatist. Within these six types of weak form bilingual education, we think that the concept of Transitional bilingual education can be a reference for schools to set up similar bilingual education to help minority children to learn Chinese. With this kind of education, minority children are allowed to use the home language for two or three years in elementary school to learn Chinese and because of the medium of instruction is their home language, they can acquire basic Cantonese vocabulary and grammar more effectively.
Reference:
Baker C. & Jones P. S. (1998) Encyclopedia of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education. Multilingual Matters Ltd.: Cleveon.
Baker,Colin.2009.Becoming bilingual through bilingual education. In Peter Auer and Li Wei, eds. Handbook of Multilingualism and Multicultural Communication. Berlin/NY: Mouton de Gruyter. P.131-152.
6 steps to effective learn Cantonese in Hong Kong
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