Chinese Cultural Readings for non-Chinese Speaking Students: Historical Personages
Name of Grantee: The Education University of Hong Kong
Objective: To compile a Chinese cultural reader for non-Chinese speakers
A Chinese culture reader was compiled in the project for non-Chinese speaking (NCS) students who endeavor to enhance their Chinese language proficiency. With a view to cultivating students' interests in learning Chinese and improving their Chinese reading skills, the reader can be used for classrooms teaching as well as after-class leisure reading.
The reader introduces stories of 20 famous historical figures chronologically which enables the NCS students to gain a general impression of Chinese history and deepen their understanding of Chinese culture. Each short story has around 500 words. The wording and the vocabulary of the reader are refined based on the corpus analysis so that it can better match the Chinese proficiency levels of the NCS students. Apart from the Chinese texts and the in-text illustrations, each story includes an abstract written in English, annotation written in English for Chinese vocabulary, Cantonese phonetic transcription for the whole story, etc., in order to facilitate the NCS students to further research into other references and extend their studies.
Copies of the reader have been distributed to different primary schools, secondary schools, special schools, non-governmental organisations, public libraries, etc. for reading.
