Young bilingual teachers are keen to pass on their English-language expertise in our schools, bit city doesn’t understand how valuable bilingualism is, experts say

[…] For professors Virginia Yip and Stephen Matthews, husband-and-wife linguists and co-directors of the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre (CBRC) at Chinese University, this emerging generation of bilinguals underlies a distinct edge of Hong Kong – a fertile environment for bilingualism, something that the couple feel is often undervalued by the media and society at large.

“As a result of historical circumstances, we have a bilingual, and increasingly trilingual society,” says Matthews. “This can be a challenge but also an opportunity. The public is just not sufficiently aware of the advantages this presents.”

Under the linguists’ leadership, CBRC has conducted studies of local children growing up bilingually in English and Cantonese for more than 10 years. In reference to their substantial and continuously growing body of research, Matthews says: “The fluently bilingual young people from our earliest studies are adults about to enter the workforce. Is the standard of English in Hong Kong declining? It could be said to be the opposite.”

Over the years, the CBRC’s studies have clearly shown that children can achieve fluent bilingualism given the right environments, even in two languages as unrelated as Chinese and English. Both research done by Hong Kong linguists and by the international scientific community also consistently shows how bilingualism gives children wide-ranging cognitive benefits and, counterintuitively, allows them to gain literacy in both languages more efficiently for academic success. More.

See: South China Morning Post

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