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The following is issued jointly by the Department of Health and the City University of Hong Kong:
The Language Information Sciences Research Centre (LISRC) of City University of Hong Kong, and the Child Assessment Service (CAS) of the Department of Health, have completed the first phase of a joint project, HKCOLAS (Hong Kong Cantonese Oral Language Assessment Scale).
HKCOLAS aims at developing a battery of tests for evaluating the native oral language ability of pre-primary and primary school-age children in Hong Kong. It is a three-and-a-half-year project which began in September 2002. HKCOLAS assesses children's language proficiency in three major domains: vocabulary, grammar, and narrative skills.
To date, pilot testing has been conducted yielding results depicting the language skills of children from kindergarten to primary six. The results revealed groundbreaking findings that children have already acquired the basic grammar by their early primary school-age years. The acquisition of many basic grammatical structures seemed to be much earlier in Cantonese-speaking children than in English-speaking children. In other language domains, the children develop progressively all through their primary school years. So then, why are Hong Kong students often seen to have poorer language skills than children in other communities? These preliminary findings have much wider implications for language issues in Hong Kong Society.
HKCOLAS will be Hong Kong's first standardized assessment tool evaluating the native oral language proficiencies of pre-primary and primary school-age children. The project, headed by Prof Benjamin Tsou of LISRC and Consultant pediatrician Dr Catherine Lam of CAS, includes language experts and experienced speech therapists covering the areas of child language acquisition, Cantonese linguistics, language assessment and testing, socio- and educational linguistics.
The large-scale joint project, with a combined budget of several million dollars, represents an innovative effort in mother tongue assessment for not only Hong Kong, but for all Chinese communities, where expertise of language scientists and clinical practitioners are fruitfully combined.
It is estimated that among the 630,000 pre-primary and primary school-age children in Hong Kong, approximately 8 to 12 percent of these children suffer from some form of speech and language impairment such as deficiencies in pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and conversational use of language, which affects their academic performance as well as their social and intellectual development.
Early identification of these children will not only enable them to receive help, but also reduce educational and societal costs in the long run. For a long time, speech therapists and educationalists in Hong Kong have felt the need for a standardized battery of tests for the identification of oral language impairment of pre-primary and primary school-age children.
There are huge discrepancies between the oral language - Cantonese, and the written language - Modern Standard Chinese we use in Hong Kong. Children learn Cantonese first at home. It is not until children begin schooling that they begin to learn Modern Standard Chinese which is based mostly on Mandarin. Children's awareness of the difference between appropriate Cantonese and Modern Standard Chinese registers in their spoken language, and their ability to switch between them closely reflect their language competence. This is an area that the HKCOLAS project aims at investigating and thus acquires special significance in the light of the government policy for school-age children to attain biliteracy and trilingualism, involving also English, which they learn even later.
Communication is an integral part of an individual's life experience. The ability to communicate is vital for an individual to learn about the world, to master knowledge and skills, and to interact with others. Oral language ability in one's native tongue is critical for intellectual, social, and emotional development. Children with communication and language impairment are at risk for not achieving their potential in these areas of development.
For further information on the HKCOLAS project, please contact Mr. Yuen (Tel:2784 4493, Fax:2788 9828)of the Language Information Sciences Research Centre of City University of Hong Kong.
Ends/Friday, July 4, 2003
Issued at HKT 16:06
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