Teaching development grants final and financial report: Developing a corpus-based online pronunciation learning system for Cantonese learners of Mandarin and Japanese

Hong Kong is a metropolitan city that serves as an international financial centre, which has given rise to multi-lingual characteristics in recent years. In addition to Cantonese and English which serve mostly as first and second languages, Hong Kong residents have increasingly started to develop a third or even a fourth language. For example, Mandarin is encouraged by the Biliteracy and Trilingualism (兩文三語) language policy, while Japanese is the most frequently learned third or fourth language among all Asian languages. The principal investigator (PI) Chen completed her faculty-level Teaching Development Grant (TDG) project “A Corpus-based Online Pronunciation Learning System: The Pedagogical Applications of a Spoken Corpus in Improving Hong Kong/Mainland University Students’ English Pronunciation” in May 2014. A spoken English corpus for Chinese learners has been made freely available online to the general public (http://ec-concord.ied.edu.hk/phonetics_and_phonology/wordpress/). As multilingualism has been identified as a key teaching and research agenda for the Department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies (LML), we believe that a multilingual learners’ corpus project focusing on comparative phonological studies of Cantonese, Mandarin and Japanese will provide a platform to promote quality teaching and research in the LML department and the Faculty of Humanities (FHM). Based on the framework of the previous corpus, this project aims to develop a corpus-based online pronunciation learning system for Mandarin and Japanese to help HKIEd teachers, learners and researchers better understand the major problems in learning Mandarin and Japanese pronunciation encountered by Hong Kong Cantonese learners. Two learners’ pronunciation corpora will be established and analysed in order (a) to identify learners’ recurrent difficulties in accurately and appropriately using Mandarin and Japanese segmental and suprasegmental features and (b) to suggest possible solutions to reduce or eliminate such difficulties. The research findings and products will inform teaching practices and enhance teaching quality.