The Challenges of Teaching Non-Chinese Speaking Children to Learn Chinese at Kindergarten Level

Abstract

The demographics of the Hong Kong population are becoming more linguistically and ethnically diverse. As of Year 2011, the South Asian ethnic minorities represented 6.4% of the total HK population. The difficulties in mastering Chinese put such non-Chinese speaking (NCS) students at risk of marginalization. Most teachers in kindergartens had little opportunity to learn how to teach learners who are learning Chinese as a second language (L2). Facing these challenges, a 4-Tier Professional Development Model has been developed to prepare linguistically responsive teachers and to improve teachers’ efficacy in developing effective pedagogies for these learners. The implementation and effectiveness of this PD Model will be reported and discussed.

Speaker

About the Speaker

Dr. CHEUNG Wai Ming is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong. She is the Principal Investigator of a large scale University-School Support Programme (USP) project and General Research Fund (GRF) project in investigating the learning and teaching of Chinese language for NCS primary school students.

Date

05 November 2015 (Thursday), 12:45 - 02:00pm

Location

Room 205, 2nd Floor, Runme Shaw Building , HKU

Chair

Professor Angel Lin