The world's first-ever Cantonese oral language assessment tool for pre-primary and primary schoolchildren has been launched in Hong Kong.
The tool - the Hong Kong Cantonese Oral Language Assessment Scale - aims to identify children with language difficulties at an early stage and help them accordingly.
Leung Ting-hung, deputy director of health, said yesterday a language assessment tool had been available for pre-school children but not for Cantonese-speaking schoolchildren.
'The new tool will help us establish the benchmark for a child with normal language ability. Once we have this information ... it allows us to develop a more simplified selection tool in the future to identify children with language difficulties,' he said.
The tool - developed by the Department of Health and City University at a cost of $5 million - covers six main areas: Cantonese grammar, expressive nominal vocabulary, lexical semantic relations, word definition, textual comprehension and narrative skills.
Children with specific language impairment and other language-related development problems such as limited intelligence, autistic spectrum disorder and hearing loss and articulation, will benefit.