Teaching Jyutping to non-Chinese-speaking secondary school students in Hong Kong

Cantonese Jyutping romanization is indispensable for effective teaching of Chinese as a second language in Hong Kong, a predominantly Cantonese-speaking city. Jyutping functions both as an auxiliary system that allows non-Chinese-speaking (NCS) students to read and write Cantonese words without knowing the characters, and a convenient way to input Chinese characters on digital devices. This chapter outlines the course structure of a 13-week intervention program that aims at teaching Jyutping typing to NCS students in Hong Kong. The intervention program was run three times, and the design was modified after each test-run to work around different pedagogical and linguistic issues. After the first intervention, hands-on typing sessions were added to every meeting, and the teaching order of Jyutping elements and teaching plans were also adjusted. These changes improved the overall effectiveness of the intervention. Two error analyses from post-tests of the second and third interventions show that the onsets z- and c- are the most problematic elements to NCS students. Our experience demonstrates how Jyutping can be integrated successfully into the broader Chinese curriculum. Copyright © 2019 selection and editorial matter, John C. Wakefield; individual chapters, the contributors.