How can we restructure weekend Chinese school so that it will allow the students to develop, gain, and maintain Cantonese proficiency?
Creator:
Emily Huynh 黄愛怡 (she/her)
For those who had to give up 3 hours of their Saturdays as children so they can be sent over to school and learn a Sinitic language (likely Cantonese, Mandarin, or both), the vast majority will report how much they hated it because they were stuck in a classroom while their friends were sleeping, playing, watching movies, hanging out, doing anything other than being in school after already having spent 5 days at school earlier in the week. It also doesn’t help that these schools follow a highly rigid educational format based heavily on memorization and dictation, with little concern for learners’ experience and whether or not those traditional educational styles are suitable for diasporic children. At the same time, many diasporic adults also report that they either are thankful for having retained their heritage language, or wish that they had been better able to retain their heritage language. This highlights the importance of heritage language proficiency retention among diasporic speakers, and the need to reconcile this need with the pragmatic challenges of diasporic childhood language education. Emily presents a series of learning plans, supported by academic sources, to try to make the Cantonese-learning experience much more enjoyable than the current traditional approach. If you were a child learning Cantonese, would you have found this helpful?