Workshop on Bilingualism and Language Acquisition:
Distinguished Speakers Lecture Series

WELCOME

We are pleased to announce a Workshop on Bilingualism and Language Acquisition to be held on 17 March 2010 at Cho Yiu Conference Hall, the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Ellen Bialystok (York University, Canada)

Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology

Maria Polinsky (Harvard University, USA)

Professor of Linguistics

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AIMS

The Workshop brings together researchers working on different areas in the fields of bilingualism and language acquisition, in an effort to promote the integration of research in both fields. The study of how children acquire two or more languages, including Chinese languages, has drawn increasing attention and has been gathering research momentum in recent years. The Workshop will launch the Distinguished Speakers Lectures Series, with two keynote speakers giving inaugural speeches. In addition, a number of speakers from institutions in Hong Kong will present their work at the Workshop. Represented in the Workshop are researchers from linguistics, neuro-cognitive science, psychology, speech therapy, engineering and language education. TheWorkshop seeks to create a platform to facilitate presentation and exchange of recent findings on bilingual acquisition involving Cantonese, Mandarin and English. We hope to forge a dialogue and synergy between researchers who share similar interests in bilingual acquisition, stimulating research with an interdisciplinary perspective. The Workshop will be of interest to a wide spectrum of professionals in early childhood education, language pathology, speech science and teacher training.

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REGISTRATION

Registration is required for attendance:
Click here to download the registration form in PDF FORMAT
Click here to download the registration form in WORD FORMAT

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PROGRAM

9:00-9:30am

Registration

9:30-10:10am

Opening Ceremony

10:10-11:10am

Keynote Speech: Early birds have words: 早學三光， 晚學三荒 (PDF)
Professor Maria Polinsky (Department of Linguistics, Harvard University)

11:10-11:30am

Tea Break

11:30-11:50am

Bilingualism and language acquisition in early childhood: research and application (PDF)
Professor Virginia Yip (Director, CBRC, Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, CUHK) and Dr Stephen Matthews (Department of Linguistics, University of Hong Kong & Co-Director, CBRC)

11:50-12:10am

Assessment of Mandarin Receptive Vocabulary in Hong Kong Children
(PDF)
Angel Chan (Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, Hong Kong Polytechnic University & CBRC), Kathy Lee (Division of Speech Therapy, Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, Faculty of Medicine, CUHK) and Virginia Yip (CBRC)

12:10-12:30pm

The acquisition of rhythm in bilingual children
Professor Peggy Mok (CBRC & Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, CUHK)

12:30-12:50pm

Computer-aided Language Learning: applications for early childhood education (PDF)
Professor Helen Meng (Director, Human-Computer Communications Laboratory; Co-Director, MoE-Microsoft Key Laboratory of Human-Centric Computing and Interface Technologies, Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management, CUHK), Dr. Pauline Lee (Director, Independent Learning Centre, CUHK) and Professor Virginia Yip (CBRC, CUHK)

12:50-2:00pm

Lunch

2:00-2:20 pm

Parent-child interactions for language and literacy skills in Hong Kong Chinese children (PDF)
Professor Catherine McBride-Chang (Department of Psychology, CUHK) and Professor Cheung Him (Department of Psychology, CUHK)

2:20-2:40 pm

English as a second language: views of local preschool teacher
Professor Samuel Leung Cheung Shing (Head, Department of Early Childhood Education, Hong Kong Institute of Education)

2:40-3:00pm

The emergence of bilingual education in the Hong Kong Pre-primary sector: challenges in early language learning
Professor Richard Wong (Early Childhood and Elementary Education Division, Hong Kong Baptist University)

3:00-3:20pm

Chinese dyslexia: multiple problems without a core deficit
Professor Tan Li Hai (Co-Director, The State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Hong Kong)

3:20-3:50pm

Tea Break

3:50-4:50pm

Keynote Speech: Cognitive advantages of bilingualism in early childhood (PDF)
Professor Ellen Bialystok (Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology, York University)

4:50-6:00pm

Concluding remarks
Professor Ellen Bialystok (York)
Professor Maria Polinsky (Harvard)

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KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

		Ellen Bialystok (York University) Ellen Bialystok is a Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology at York University and Associate Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute of the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1976 studying the relation between children’s conceptual and linguistic development, especially as it applied to spatial cognition. She then turned to the problem of second language acquisition and investigated the process by which children and adults acquire additional languages. The model she developed in this research showing how interactions between specific linguistic systems and generalized knowledge systems were required to learn a second language formed the basis of her research examining metalinguistic awareness and literacy acquisition in young children. Much of her research in the past 20 years has focused on the effect of bilingualism on children’s language and cognitive development, showing accelerated mastery of specific cognitive processes for bilingual children. More recently, this research has been extended to investigations of adult processing and cognitive aging, showing the continuity of these bilingual advantages into adulthood and the protection against cognitive decline in healthy aging for bilingual older adults. She is the author or editor of 7 books and over 100 scientific papers in journals and books. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and among her awards are a Killam Research Fellowship, Walter Gordon Research Fellowship, Dean’s Award for Outstanding Research, and the Donald T. Stuss Award for Research Excellence at the Baycrest Geriatric Centre, and the President’s Research Award of Merit at York University. <back to top>
		Maria Polinsky (Harvard University) Maria Polinsky is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Director of the Language Processing Lab at Harvard University. She is a theoretical linguist with special interests in syntactic theory and language change in minority (heritage) languages. In her current work, she focuses on experimental approaches to testing linguistic theory. She is currently an Associate Editor of Natural Language and Linguistic Theory and has served or currently serves on the editorial boards of seven additional journals, including Language and Heritage Language Journal.  The author of over one hundred peer-reviewed journal articles, two books, and editor of four other books, she is particularly interested in Austronesian languages and has been working on experimental testing of lesser studied languages. Her research on heritage languages has thus far included Russian, Korean, Spanish, Chinese, and Tongan. <back to top>

INVITED SPEAKERS

		Angel Chan (Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, Hong Kong Polytechnic University ) Dr. Angel Chan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies at PolyU, Honorary Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at HKU, and a founding member of the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre at CUHK. She serves on the executive committee board of the International Association for the Study of Child Language. Dr. Chan conducted her doctoral research in developmental psycholinguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. She studies child first and second language acquisition in cross-linguistic and multilingual contexts, involving Cantonese, Mandarin, English and German. Her work is published in Cognitive Linguistics, International Journal of Bilingualism, and Cognitive Development. Her interests also include cognitive linguistic, functional typological, and processing approaches to the study of language acquisition, clinical linguistics, and the development of speech and language assessment tools for Hong Kong children’s English and Mandarin. Dr. Chan is a qualified speech therapist. <back to top>
		Cheung Him (Department of Psychology, CUHK) Cheung Him received his Bachelor of Social Science (Psychology) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and his Master and PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Kansas. His research is about the relationship between short-term memory and the phonological characteristics of the to-be-recalled items, phonological awareness and reading, and the development of an understanding of people’s intention, thought, and belief in infants (9 months) and younger children (3 to 5 years). Cheung Him is a Professor in the Department of Psychology, Chinese University of Hong Kong. <back to top>
		Kathy Lee (Division of Speech Therapy, Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, Faculty of Medicine, CUHK) Kathy Y.S. LEE is currently the Chief and Assistant Professor at the Division of Speech Therapy, Dept of Otorhinolaryngology, Head & Neck Surgery, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is an experienced Speech-Language Pathologist who has been actively participating in both clinical and research work. Her main research areas lie in test standardization and validation, efficacy of intervention programs, paediatric speech and language development and, Cantonese tones. She has developed and validated the very first assessment tools for the Cantonese-speaking population including the Cantonese Receptive Vocabulary Test (CRVT) and the Cantonese Basic Speech Perception Test (CBSPT). <back to top>
		Pauline Lee (Independent Learning Centre, CUHK) Dr Pauline Lee received her B.A (Hons) degree in English from CUHK, and Doctor in Education from the University of Bristol.  Since graduation, she has worked for different institutions including secondary schools, information services department, education department, City University and CUHK as teacher, information officer, teacher trainer and administrator respectively.  She was Principal Lecturer and Associate Head of the Language Studies Division at City University of Hong Kong before taking up the Directorship of the Independent Learning Centre at CUHK where she leads the team to run workshops and provide consultations to enhance students’ Putonghua, Cantonese and English proficiency. Her research areas include business communication, ESL teaching, translation, teacher training and independent learning. The books she has edited and published include Catch Idioms (editor, 1991), Oral English (2001), English at the Certificate Level (2002), Business Communication (2003, 2006), Practical English Writing (2005), Writing a Research Paper (2008) and Writing with Success (2009). <back to top>
		Samuel Leung (Department of Early Childhood Education, Hong Kong Institute of Education) Dr. Samuel C.S. Leung is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Early Childhood Education at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. He obtained a BA in English Studies from the University of Hong Kong and received post-graduate training in English as a second Language (MA), Chinese linguistics (MA) and linguistics (Ph.D.) from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in the USA. Dr. Leung has taught courses on language development, language education and language disorders at both undergraduate and post-graduate levels. His research interests include first language acquisition, English as second language, bilingual development, and language delay and disorders in children. He has been involved in research projects funded by Hong Kong Research Grants Council on children’s language development as well as language education policy. <back to top>
		Stephen Matthews (Department of Linguistics, University of Hong Kong and Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre) Stephen Matthews is Associate Professor in Linguistics at the University of Hong Kong and Co-Director of the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has a BA in Modern and Medieval Languages from Cambridge University and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California. Research interests include language typology, processing, bilingual acquisition and language contact. The Atlas of Languages which he co-edited with Bernard Comrie and Maria Polinsky has been translated into six languages. He is co-author of several works on Cantonese including Cantonese: a Comprehensive Grammar (Routledge). His work with Virginia Yip includes the monograph The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact (Cambridge University Press) which received the Linguistic Society of America’s Leonard Bloomfield Book Award. He has served on the editorial boards of Linguistics and Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, and on the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong and the International Association of Chinese Linguistics. <back to top>
		Catherine McBride-Chang (Department of Psychology, CUHK) Catherine McBride-Chang is a Professor in the Psychology Department of The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is a developmental psychologist with special interests in literacy and language development. She is currently an Associate Editor of Developmental Psychology and Journal of Research in Reading and has served or currently serves on the editorial boards of seven additional journals, including Psychological Science, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, and the Journal of Educational Psychology.  The author of over one hundred peer-reviewed journal articles and two books, she is Vice President of the Society for the Scientific Studies of Reading, an international organization devoted to reading research and a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.   Her research on reading development and impairment has thus far included children from Mainland China and Hong Kong, Canada, the United States, The Netherlands, Korea, Israel, and Spain.   <back to top>
		Helen Meng (Human-Computer Communications Laboratory; Microsoft-CUHK Joint Laboratory for Human-centric Computing and Interface Technologies, Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management, CUHK) Helen Meng is Professor in the CUHK Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management. She also serves as Associate Dean of Research for the Faculty of Engineering. She received her Bachelor of Science, Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Electrical Engineering, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is Founding Director of the Human-Computer Communications Laboratory (since 1999) and the Microsoft-CUHK Joint Laboratory for Human-centric Computing and Interface Technologies (since 2005). The latter was recognized by China’s Ministry of Education as a Key Laboratory in 2008. Helen is Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing. She is the recipient of the CUHK Faculty of Engineering Exemplary Teaching Award 2001, Service Award for establishing the Worldwide Engineering Undergraduate Exchange Program in 2004, the Young Researcher Award in 2006, as well as the MoE Award for Technological Advancement in 2009. Helen’s main research interests lie in the multilingual spoken language technologies, for human-computer interaction and especially e-learning. <back to top>
		Peggy Mok (Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre, Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, CUHK) Peggy Mok received her B.A. in Chinese with first honours from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and her MPhil. and Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on phonetics, especially from a cross-linguistic perspective. She is interested in both speech production and perception. She is currently working on several research projects related to prosody: speech rhythm of Cantonese, Mandarin and Chinese-accented English; acquisition of speech rhythm by bilingual children; production and perception of tone mergers in Cantonese. Bilingual child phonology and the phonetic characteristics of new varieties of English are among her new lines of investigation. She is currently the Communication Officer of the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong and an affiliated member of Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre. <back to top>
		Tan Li Hai (The State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Hong Kong) Tan Li Hai is a Professor of Psycholinguistics in the School of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Hong Kong in 1995. Dr. Tan has conducted research in the field of reading and reading disorders at the University of Hong Kong, the Research Imaging Center of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, University of Pittsburgh, and Intramural Research Programs of the National Institute of Mental Health of NIH. His main research interest is to use neuroimaging (fMRI and PET) and cognitive techniques to investigate neuroanatomical and cognitive mechanisms underlying language processing and language learning. The studies conducted by Dr. Tan and his collaborators have shown that the left middle frontal gyrus responsible for verbal working memory critically mediates Chinese character recognition, whereas the left posterior temporoparietal regions critical for English reading are less involved in Chinese reading. <back to top>
		Richard Wong (Early Childhood and Elementary Education Division, Hong Kong Baptist University) Richard WONG Kwok Shing is the author of Challenges in Early English Learning (Pearson Longman, 2009). Dr Wong received his doctorate from the Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. He then joined the Department of Early Childhood Education at the Hong Kong Institute of Education as a lecturer, becoming Deputy Head of the Centre for Early Childhood Research and Development at the HKIEd and a research team member of a project commissioned by the Macau SAR government investigating how Chinese is taught at kindergartens in Macau. As the first author of the final report, Dr Wong presented the findings to the education authority in Macau in May 2009. Currently Assistant Professor at the School of Continuing Education at the Hong Kong Baptist University, Dr Wong is working on his second book Enhancing Oral Language Proficiency in the Early Years. <back to top>
		Virginia Yip (Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre, Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, CUHK) Virginia Yip is Professor in Linguistics and Director of the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include bilingual acquisition, second language acquisition, Cantonese, Chaozhou and comparative Sinitic grammar, psycholinguistics and cognitive science. She is the author of Interlanguage and Learnability: from Chinese to English (Benjamins) and co-author of a series of works on Cantonese grammar published by Routledge: Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar, Basic Cantonese and Intermediate Cantonese. Her monograph The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact (Cambridge University Press) received a Research Excellence Award from CUHK in 2007 and the Linguistic Society of America’s Leonard Bloomfield Book Award in 2009. Her team has created the Hong Kong Bilingual Child Language Corpus, the first longitudinal bilingual corpus in which Cantonese is represented along with English, and the largest multimedia bilingual corpus in the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) at Carnegie Mellon University. She serves on the editorial board of Bilingualism: Language and Cognition and Second Language Research. <back to top>

 

FEEDBACK

Here are some written comments on the Workshop from our participants:

- I travelled thousand of miles to take part in the Workshop on Bilingualism and Early Language Acquisition and was inspired by the quality and variety of presentations during the day. The keynote speakers delivered outstanding presentations on major current research issues i.e. cognitive-benefits of bilingualism and heritage languages. The highlights of the day included talks on assessments of language outcomes, parent participation and issues relating to education. A perfect blend of research and practical applications. Well done and Congratulations to Prof. Yip and S. Matthews for taking this initiative.

- There has often been the misconception that Hong Kong lacked the critical mass of scholars who studied Hong Kong children's acquisition of the following three languages: Cantonese, English and Mandarin. 15 years ago that may have been true - but now it does not seem true anymore. During the conference scholars from across a range of related disciplines: neuroscience, linguistics, developmental psychology, early childhood, computational linguistics, etc. were brought together to engage in a very fruitful dialogue about the topic of trilingualism (more than anyone could have expected because the series title involves the word bilingualism rather than trilingualism!!!). Even more importantly, if we look beyond who were 'talking', we would find that among the audience were a number of early childhood administrators and practitioners. Their presence means that for the first time researchers (from the afore-mentioned disciplines) and practitioners gathered together to listen to one another. This experience was transformational because it allowed both parties to reflect on whether there is any gap between research and practice. This bilingualism workshop series provided a good starting point for tightly mapping developmental norms with teaching practices. Hope that there will be more similar series in the future!
從前常聽道：「香港不單祇是一個文化沙漠，也是一個語言研究的沙漠；香港的學術界實在缺乏海外大學所擁有的頂尖學者，尤其是研究兩文三語的專業人才。」上述的一番話可能反映了十五年前的「現實」。但「現實」終歸會隨著歲月的變遷而改變的。在這個有關雙語發展的講座系列裏，從事不同類型研究的學者（有腦科的、語言學的、發展心理學的、幼兒教育的、電腦工程的）在香港中文大學聚首一堂，發表他們有關香港兩文三語發展的研究報告。本人實在感到獲益不淺。而最重要的是，講座的聽眾不乏前線的幼教行政人員和老師。在各演說發表的過程裏，學者和幼教工作者有一整天的時間反思現時「研究」和「實踐」兩者間之洪溝。本人希望中大能繼續舉辦類似的雙語研究講座系列或工作坊，因為它正正提供了一個切合香港教育需要的平台，讓學者和幼教工作人員深入探討拓展幼兒兩文三語的教育策略。

- Congratulations on the workshop and thank you very much for telling me about it. It was very inspiring and I learnt a lot. My knowledge is so limited that the Workshop really opened my eyes! I was amazed regarding the data on the topic on rhythm and also the Chelsea software!! 
Unfortunately I had to go back to work in the afternoon... there should be more for me to learn in the afternoon session! Thank you very much again and I look forward to your coming workshop!

- I like the design of the poster for this workshop very much! I also like the paper title of Prof. Polinsky's keynote speech, both the English title and its Chinese translation for the humorous use of pun!

- I love the papers related to technology, like computer.

- The time control was perfect, and presenters presented in a clear and effective way. What's more, it would be better if every talk has a printed ppt for us. Thank you very much for this workshop. We students could learn a lot through this workshop, having this opportunity to listen to scholars' talks.

- A lot of the papers presented are valuable. The workshop was well organized.

- The workshop has reminded me again the close relationship between bilingualism and our life now. It has provided an opportunity for us to understand the issues of bilingualism and child language acquisition from different perspectives. From the perspectives of reseachers, we understand more about the potential that children can have in acquiring languages during early childhood. From the perspectives of educators and parents, we also realize how much children can benefit from acquiring two or more languages from an early age and what we can do for our next generation in order to make sure they benefit from lifelong language learning. In short, the workshop has appropriately and successfully responded to the issues on bilingualism and language acquisition from different angles through inspiring presentations and fruitful discussion.

- Everyone who went to the workshop would attest to what a big success the event was. It was such a privilege to be among world-class child bilingualism researchers who had such inspiring new insights on the field to share. Events of this calibre are rare and much needed in the field, and praise must be given to Professor Yip and Dr. Matthews for putting together such a magnificent event!

- This is a very inspiring workshop! The talks are interdisciplinary. Scholars from linguistics, psychology, engineering and education as well as educators from kindergartens all gathered to share their expertise from various perspectives. This is a good chance to put research into practice. Also, the keynote speakers have given very insightful presentations. I have learned a lot from this workshop.

- The Workshop was very inspiring and successful in offering an exchange of recent advances on bilingualism and language acquisition. It contributed to our understanding of the most intriguing of all mental phenomena - children's ability to acquire multiple languages without effort and without conscious knowledge of the underlying regularities of languages.
The Workshop covered a wide scope of interests to Bilingualism: from theoretical issues to biological cognates and behavioural studies, as well as language pedagogy, expressive speech and written language literacy. It is very special to have a bilingualism and language acquisition workshop here in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong has been a special place to bilingualism or even multilingualism studies. Children normally acquire Cantonese, English, Putonghua and written Chinese altogether. Children are immersed in a multilingual environment in a school setting. However, when it comes to daily situations, English and Putonghua are of comparative much less (though increasing) usage.
It is different from other multilingual countries, where learning to speak different languages in different settings is crucial. For example, in India, children speak their heritage language at home, speak another when attending religious events, and use English or Hindu as lingua franca. It is always interesting to see how language environment and language attitude would interact to affect acquisition of languages. Hong Kong is certainly a good place to observe such phenomena.
There is an increasing number of young mainland emigrants who have to adapt to the new language environments in school; as well as an increasing number of families with one of the parents not speaking Cantonese and choose to speak Putonghua to children. I expect it would become the next focus of interest for the field of language learning and teaching in Hong Kong in the near future. With the results from longitudinal studies started a few years back starting to yield, I look forward to similar workshops like this in the future.

- I just wanted to congratulate you on last Wednesday's Workshop, in my view it was a complete success.

- Thanks a lot for organising such an inspirational and stimulating workshop! I would like to give my feedback about the workshop I attended on 17 March. To me, hearing about the current intriguing research on bilingualism/language acquisition and meeting such a variety of people from the field was one of the most impressive aspects of the workshop.
Although I was not able to attend all the sessions, I found most topics/information presented interesting. I think this conference did a good job of blending research with frontline preschool educators. I appreciated the excellent mix of research and functional application. The sessions that I found particularly informative and useful are: Early birds have words, Bilingualism and language acquisition in early childhood: research and application, The acquisition of rhythm in bilingual children, and Cognitive advantages of bilingualism in early childhood. I think the quality of these presentations was excellent and the information was very inspiring.
The workshop is well organized with good time control as well as effective audio and visual aids. The topics were well scheduled. More presentation handouts could be provided to the participants. There could be two Q & A (one AM, one PM) sessions to cater for participants attending different sessions.
Thank you very much again for organising such a useful workshop. I look forward to attending more in the future!

- The notion of “Heritage language” was mentioned in Prof. Maria Polinsky’s
keynote speech. China is a country with various ethnicities and languages. Protecting minority languages has been expressly stipulated in both the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China and Law of the People's Republic of China on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language. But in fact, all of the ethnic minorities inside China, which have their own languages, are coming up against the problem of “Powerful Chinese”. Consequently, the bilingual policy, Chinese plus languages of ethnic minority, has to be put into effect. The intention of this language policy was quite good，but in the implementation process, different areas and different minority language usages cause formation of bilinguals to varying degrees. (For example: Tibetans who live in Xizhang, Uyghur and Kazakhs who live in Xinjiang.) On the one hand, this kind of “bilinguals” basically acquire Chinese and their own national language at the same time illustrate in a way that the ethnic minority formed a good bilingual environment where children can acquire both languages at their early age and their language heritage is preserved well. On the other hand, the Yi and the Miao nationality etc. with large population in Southwest of China (in urban areas) who are affected by the “Powerful Chinese” cannot benefit from a good language environment or social language atmosphere which would allow the national public to start acquiring their own minority language at an early age, but only after they enter primary school or middle school. This kind of circumstance is more worrisome. Bilingualism scholars may want to pay attention to this special bilingual case in China. “Bilingual” as discussed in the Workshop mainly focused on English, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) and other “great languages” which are widely used in the world but less attention is paid to the minority languages whose communities are comparatively small. In China there are rich language resources and varied bilingual circumstances, which may provide quite a lot of materials for bilingualism research.
作為一個語言教育者，通常會了解到很多關於語言教育中的具體情況，但是
這些情況都來自於經驗的積累，面對這些情況的對策也僅僅是一些表層的經
驗性對策，並不會得出據有理據性的總結。聽Workshop的過程中，感受到組
織者精心的安排，題目由理論到時間，由抽象到具體，由感受到實驗，這樣
據有漸進性的安排，使我很清楚地理解每個題目的內涵，又了解了題目與題
目之間的聯繫。聽過Workshop之後，我為自己之前碰到的很多實際現象找到
了據有實驗與統計支持的科學根據，這些對於進行“雙語教育”或者“語言
教育”都據有很深刻的導向意義。同時，也希望在日後的Workshop中，除了
可以聆聽據有總結性的研究報告之外，還可以聽到據有直接指導效果的實例
報告。例如，特定情況下，雙語兒童表現出的言語特徵與相同問題下單語者
的特徵之比較；應對“雙語環境，雙語教育”的對策。此外，我對新教育工
具的使用很有興趣，很希望在日後的Workshop中，可以留出一段時間作一個
簡單的“新教育工具使用講習”。

- Thank you very much for organising such a fantastic workshop. I enjoyed it
very much and I believe that your research centre will play an important and promising role in the field.

- First, I wish to say a thousand thanks to all the organizers and distinguished speakers whose concerted effort made the workshop a huge success. Being a PhD student having my research interest chiefly focused on dyslexia, I deem it is an excellent opportunity for me to attend a workshop of this kind. Frankly, I treasure a lot the chances of leaving my own workspace for a day or two and joining workshops/seminars on slightly different but related research areas. Issues on bilingualism and language acquisition are unquestionably inspiring to me. Amongst all fascinating speeches, I especially enjoyed Prof. Polinsky’s sharing of heritage languages because personally I have an immense interest in minority languages, yet it is rather rare for me to come across it in my daily research.
I hereby wish all the speakers every success in their research work!

- Many thanks for the recent workshop on bilingualism and a good day in CUHK!
Before coming to your workshop, I knew little about bilingualism. Now I have a better understanding of it and learn more about what makes good research on bilingualism. It was an experience that would make a lasting impression and it was really a pleasure to spend a whole day together with the experts on bilingualism research.

- It was a wonderful day attending inspirational lectures by experts in the field, as Prof. Bialystock said earlier, doing research on Bilingualism is not easy. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the organizing committee and distinguished speakers. The registration was quick and smooth, venue of the workshop was beautiful although some of the audience had to sit on the floor during the talk. I also very much appreciated the tea breaks, there’s really a lot of refreshing drinks and snacks for us (I should say that was the best tea break I ever had) : )
I look forward to attending more seminars and workshops in the near future!

- "I can't tell you how much I enjoyed the talks and the forum that allowed lively interactions between the speakers and the audiences. The workshop was academically stimulating and educationally informative, one of a kind."

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PHOTO

Photos of the workshop are now available online. Please click here.

TRANSPORTATION

Campus map of the Chinese University of Hong Kong: print version

Transportation from the University Train Station to the Conference Venue The University provides regular free school bus services from the MTR (formerly KCR) University train station to the main campus throughout the day.

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CONTACT US

cbrc@cuhk.edu.hk
telephone inquiry : 26961995, 26961930
fax number: 26037865

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KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Invited Speakers

Organizers

• Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre, Department of Linguistics and
  Modern Languages,
  Chinese University of Hong Kong
  兒童雙語研究中心
  語言學及現代語言系
  香港中文大學
• The State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences,
  University of Hong Kong
  腦與認知科學國家重點實驗室
  香港大學
• Global Parent Child Resource Centre,
  Braemar Hill Nursery School
  寶山親子資源中心
  寶山幼兒園

CONTACT US

cbrc@cuhk.edu.hk
telephone inquiry : 26961995, 26961930
fax number: 26037865

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The Workshop is jointly organized by:

      

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