Hong Kong Primary School Language Teaching Language Of Status Quo And Experimental Analysis Of The Teaching Of Putonghua

Since Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty on 1st July 1997, the connection and relationship between China and Hong has been getting closer and closer. It is a reason to explain why Mandarin becomes so popular in Hong Kong among the government administration, daily social life, economics and education. To meet the demand of Mandarin from the society, in the recent 10 years, most of the schools in Hong Kong focus on enhancing their students' ability in Mandarin. Since 80th century, Mandarin starts to be included as a regular subject in primary and secondary schools. By that time, students who are in primary four had a Mandarin lesson once a week. After the handover, the government of Hong Kong adopted the "illiterate and trilingual" policy. Mandarin has been included as a main subject since 1998, and it has been taught from Primary one. In 1999, some schools tried to enhance the students' interest and ability in Mandarin; they started to apply this approach. Mandarin as an instruction media might be a breakthrough for learning Chinese. Whether the instruction media is effective in promoting the language learning is a meaningful topic for study? In order to probe into the issue, the school of the writer has started teaching Chinese in Mandarin for classes remain unchanged in Cantonese. After six years of learning Chinese in Mandarin, the test result of the students will be compared to that of the control group (the result of the Cantonese classes). The tests will be on all the aspects of the language skills, such as, listening, reading, speaking, writing, lexical ability, syntactical ability, etc. The analysis result will be used to justify the effectiveness and possibility teaching Chinese in Mandarin in Hong Kong, the Special Administrative Region of China. Besides, the problems that may be occurred on the process of carrying out the policy will also be investigated. The writer will then propose some useful recommendations to improve the implementation. According to the result of a study for adopting the "illiterate and trilingual" policy into primary schools, it proves that the students'literacy of Chinese language has been enhanced. It is mainly showed on their sensitive of the Chinese language and the ways they apply and use this language. Besides, we can see the students after the study are more in advanced than the students from the'control group' since they have gained better interested and confidence in learning Chinese language. This result shows us that'illiterate and trilingual' policy will be good for the students in learning Chinese; however, there are a lot of different levels of problems and challenges need to be considered. They are such as Education policy in Hong Kong, the teacher qualifications, teaching materials, and the recognition from the public etc. Therefore, before we introduce and apply the'illiterate and trilingual' policy into local primary schools, firstly we need to settle and integrate the concerns of Education policy and Society policy in helping to have a smoother transition.