Letters | Let Hong Kong’s ethnic minority students learn Chinese alongside native speakers in school
- Public schools in Hong Kong put minority students into separate Chinese classes from native speakers, which causes them to learn at a slower rate
Schools with Chinese as the medium of instruction often deal with the “problem” of non-native Chinese speakers by separating them into different Chinese classes from the native Chinese children. Surrounded by non-native Chinese speakers and taught from different textbooks, ethnic minority students learn at a much slower rate. As they progress through the school system, they are inevitably unable to cope with the same Chinese language examinations as their Chinese-speaking counterparts. They are indeed “set up to fail”.
The government’s Chinese Language Curriculum Second Language Adapted Learning Framework may also be an open invitation for schools to separate ethnic minority students into different Chinese language bands, from which there is no known route to mainstream Chinese language classes.
Instead of funding Chinese language support strategies which reinforce segregation, I believe we should focus on keeping ethnic minority children learning effectively in a mainstream Chinese-medium classroom.
The school curriculum in Hong Kong is essentially textbook-based and it would be easy to adapt the major textbooks for use by all “Chinese as Additional Language” students. This should include putting text and target vocabulary onto audio; providing vocabulary glossaries with romanisation and English; adapting Chinese character copy sheets to include meaning and pronunciation; and implementing a reading scheme of graded audiobooks.
These techniques are taken for granted in the teaching and support of Mandarin Chinese. It is astonishing that such methods are not employed to help students learning Chinese in Cantonese.