Description
The Learning and Teaching of Cantonese as a Second Language brings together contributions on such issues as Cantonese textbooks, linguistic description, literacy and tone acquisition, supplemented by case studies from the Netherlands and Japan.
The learning and teaching of Cantonese as a second language is a subject of considerable interest in the international academic community, and the first international symposium on teaching Cantonese as a second language, held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in October 2019, brought together leading researchers in this field. This conference provided the inspiration for the current volume, The Learning and Teaching of Cantonese as a Second Language.
In the Hong Kong context, historically, the term ‘Cantonese’ refers to the language varieties of immigrants who came to the territory from various areas in Guangdong province, including Macau, Panyu, Taishan, Xinhui and Zhongshan. From the late nineteenth century onwards, their speech coalesced into the contemporary variety of Cantonese used in Hong Kong today. The term ‘Cantonese’ is also used to refer to the entire Yue subgroup of Chinese, which includes varieties of Cantonese spoken in southern China, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, Singapore and among overseas Chinese in Australia, Europe and North America. In all, it is estimated that there are about 70 million Cantonese speakers in the world.
This volume is of direct relevance to educators, language teachers, linguists and all those concerned with the learning of Cantonese as a second language.
Table of Contents
List of figures
List of tables
List of contributors
1 Introduction: The learning and teaching of Cantonese as a second language
PART I
Linguistic perspective on the learning of Cantonese
2 The Cantonese mixed script
3 Written Cantonese and Cantonese textbooks in mainland China
4 How not to acquire tone: Cross-linguistic influence in prosody
5 Teaching literacy skills to Cantonese learners
PART II
Case studies from the Netherlands and Japan
6 Cantonese heritage language teaching in the Netherlands: Towards an inclusive classroom
7 The learning of Cantonese as a foreign language at Japanese universities
PART III
Current trends in Cantonese language education
8 Curriculum design and Cantonese teaching at a Hong Kong university
9 Teaching Cantonese tones to international university students in Hong Kong
10 A corpus-based approach to learning and teaching Cantonese
11 Textbook Cantonese romanization systems
12 Learning, teaching and performing Cantonese on the Internet
Index
