Abstract

With the growing needs of internationalization in tertiary education in Hong Kong, there are increasing numbers of students from different parts of the world studying in The Chinese University of Hong Kong. English language is one of the official working languages among students and teachers within the university. Cantonese language education is needed for academic work as well as for cultural pursuit in Hong Kong for non-local students and exchange students. Communication skills in Cantonese language can help non-local students and exchange students better integrate into university life and study. These skills also help foster academic and cultural exchange between local and non-local students. As a matter of fact, there are hundreds of non-local students studying Cantonese at university level each semester (including summer semester). This project intends to start build up the first and unique Cantonese learners’ corpus so that language teachers can track the linguistic and/or cultural difficulties of these learners. The corpus consists of Cantonese learners from different language and cultural background and will be used to analyze linguistics and paralinguistic features; such as pronunciation (including prosody), syntactic, pragmatic features; in different stages of Cantonese learning. The data extracted from the learners’ corpus can help curriculum review/design, teaching materials preparation, eLearning preparation and development of language enhancement activities. The project will also be beneficial to linguists studying language acquisition.