On the effect of Cantonese (L1) phonological awareness on the acquisition of English (L2) phonology among primary students in Hong Kong

On the effect of Cantonese (L1) phonological awareness on the acquisition of English (L2) phonology among primary students in Hong Kong

• Yeung, Margery Lau Luk

2007

• G Curriculum, Teaching & Learning: Specific Disciplines
  • GB English Language
    • GBC Teaching Methods of Listening, Conversation, Speech & Their Outcomes

Language Arts Cantonese Dialects - Phonology - Study and Teaching (Elementary) - Hong Kong English Language - Phonology - Study and Teaching (Elementary) - Hong Kong Language Awareness in Children - Hong Kong English Language - Acquisition

• Hong Kong

• 1997.7 onwards

• Primary Education

Due to their logographic nature, Chinese characters are traditionally learned with a whole-word approach. Starting from kindergarten, students in Hong Kong learn Chinese and English words and attain bilingual literacy in this way. However, this type of learning results in low levels of both Cantonese (L1) and English (L2) phonological awareness (PA). Phonological awareness is not only significant for emergent literacy in an alphabetic language but also for decoding unfamiliar words. For this reason, Hong Kong students have difficulty learning to read English (especially sounding out and spelling unfamiliar words). Meanwhile, Chinese readers in mainland China and other places who learn to read Chinese with a phonetic script are found to have higher phonological awareness of Chinese (Bertelson, Chen & de Gelder, 1997; H. Cheung et al., 2001; Holm & Dodd, 1996; Huang & Hanley, 1995; Read et al., 1986).
In light of the advantage brought about by a native phonetic script, the present research aims to investigate the effect of Cantonese phonological awareness on English learning by comparing the performances of an Experimental Group with phonological awareness training and a Control Group without training, both before and after training.
Two experiments were conducted from 2003 to 2004. In the pilot experiment, the Experimental Group (n = 8) which had received 10 hours of Cantonese Romanisation instruction had no immediate advantage over the control group (n = 9) concerning their post-training English phonological awareness test. However, after the two groups had received 10 hours of English phonics instruction, the Experimental Group a made significantly bigger mean progress than the Control Group (p = 0.035) in their post-training English phonological awareness test. In the main experiment, the Experimental Group (n = 19) which had received 20 hours of Cantonese Romanisation instruction made a bigger mean progress than Control Group 1 (n = 20) and Control Group 2 (n = 17) together (p = 0.020). After the Experimental Group and Control Group 1 had received 20 hours of English phonics instruction, the former no longer seemed to have an edge over the latter. Despite some inconsistency of the findings, both experiments confirmed that Cantonese Romanisation instruction had a positive effect on English phonological awareness, be it a greater or a lesser extent compared with English phonics instruction.
The findings from this research are consistent with previous findings on Hanyu Pinyin: (1) phonological awareness is trainable through native phonological awareness training, and (2) the improved native phonological awareness can transfer to a second language. In addition, this research also shows that Cantonese Romanisation instruction helps Hong Kong children learn English phonics more effectively. This is also consistent with Mok (2001) who showed the positive effect of Cantonese Romanisation instruction on the learning of Hanyu Pinyin. To conclude, Cantonese phonological awareness instruction is beneficial to the learning of English because it increases phonological awareness in children and stands them in good stead when they later receive English phonological awareness instruction.

PhD

University of Hong Kong

Hong Kong

• English

Dissertation Theses

https://bibliography.lib.eduhk.hk/bibs/7f7e78e4

2010-12-16