Challenges in acquiring Chinese as a second language in young ethnic minority children in Hong Kong

Abstract

With globalization, classrooms are becoming increasingly multicultural. This calls for the need to understand the second language (L2) learning process of ethnic minority (EM) children. These L2 children face challenges in acquiring the language especially in Hong Kong, where the dominant Chinese language is very different from their alphabetic home languages. The study explored the language abilities in terms of Chinese character acquisition in ethnically diverse children in Hong Kong kindergartens aged from three to five. This is explored in 79 L2 children using a six-subset measure developed for L2 children following theories of Chinese character acquisition. Unlike alphabetic languages, Chinese are represented by Chinese characters; each character is a morpheme and carries a syllable. The ability of Chinese character acquisition involves the associations among written forms, meaning, and sound, which are the three constituents of Chinese characters. The findings showed that most L2 children entered kindergartens at three years old without much knowledge of Chinese. Significant differences in the performances across kindergarten grades in three- to five-year-olds were also detected implying that children make progress during kindergarten stages. Investigating L2 children’s performance on different subtests provided insights on the Chinese character learning process. In particular, spoken language was found to develop before written forms of the language in these children. In this study, the uniqueness of the Chinese orthographic, morphologic and phonologic properties allows us to explore the processes of L2 learning in terms of the different associations among aspects of Chinese characters. On one hand, this study allowed us to explore the language-specific issues in L2 acquisition; on the other, the study extended our understanding in the possible differences in the various processes in acquiring language units for EM children across languages. This informs design of pedagogies and culturally accommodating assessments for L2 learners.