Interlanguage pragmatic features in Hong Kong non-Chinese speaking students’ spoken cantonese

Abstract

Non-Chinese speaking (NCS) students in the Hong Kong public school system face the challenge of developing language abilities in both Cantonese and written Chinese. Previous studies have acknowledged the significant gap between their oral and literacy skills, yet few have paid attention to their Cantonese oral abilities. While assessing reading and writing skills and discussing teaching reforms have been the primary focus (Tang, 2018; Wong, 2010), little attention has been given to NCS students’ Cantonese oral proficiency. Furthermore, previous surveys have relied on subjective analyses (Ku et al., 2005; Li & Chuk, 2015) rather than empirical measures to assess oral performance. This study addresses the research gap surrounding the Cantonese oral proficiency of NCS students by analyzing a cohort recruited from a single secondary school in Hong Kong. The sample comprised sixteen senior secondary students of Pakistani heritage, thirteen of whom were Urdudominant speakers, aged between 15 and 19 (mean age = 16.44 years). These students had an average of 12.50 years of Cantonese learning experience, ranging from intermediate to advanced levels. To assess their oral proficiency, students participated in an oral storytelling task using the wordless illustrated storybook Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969). The narratives were transcribed by a native Cantonese speaker to facilitate the analysis of prominent microstructural linguistic features present in the different renditions of the story. Based on preliminary findings, the respondents exhibited a series of distinct errors in their spoken Cantonese language usage. In terms of lexicon, students demonstrated code-mixing by incorporating English lexical items in situations where no Cantonese equivalents exist or where Cantonese equivalents are not commonly used, such as deer and owl. Additionally, some students employed standard Chinese terms instead of vernacular Cantonese; noteworthy examples include substituting 小狗 (siu2gau2) for 狗仔 (gau2zai2) when referring to “little dog”, using 小鳥 (siu2niu5) instead of 雀仔 (zoek3zai2) for “birdie”, and 好開心地 (hou2 hoi1sam1 dei6) instead of 好開心噉 (hou2 hoi1sam1 gam2) for “happily”. Syntactically, certain students tended to overuse a particular connective throughout their narrations, sometimes in inappropriate contexts, such as 噉 (gam2, “then”). These features, which are consistently observed and shared among this group of NCS students, are rare among native speakers, suggesting the emergence of a new interlanguage variant in Cantonese among South Asian speakers in Hong Kong. This study is significant in delving into naturalistic spoken data for L2 Cantonese, focusing on the production of near-native learners. The finding suggested systematic patterns and offers valuable curriculum design insights, e.g., targeted vocabulary instruction and contextual factors, to enhance students’ oral proficiency.