Why Hakka Language Revitalization Matters in Taiwan?
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
4:00 pm to 5:30 pm
- Venue
- UCL Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way
- Room
- Room W3.07
About this event
Note: This Event is co-sponsored by UCL Institute of Education and SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies.
Minority languages are frequently threatened in English dominant areas and the same situation is occurring in Chinese-speaking areas. Except for the Chinese language, the minority languages in Taiwan are facing serious intergenerational language loss. Hakka and Indigenous languages are especially endangered.
In 2013, my study found that for most students, their Hakka language proficiency would reach the highest level at fourth grade in the traditional Hakka village, Meinong, where about 40 thousand Hakka people live. Fourth grade was, therefore, marked as a distressing life-long threshold of Hakka proficiency.
The research also showed that among the third graders who have siblings, only 1% of them would speak Hakka as their major language at home. Hakka people are afraid that they are going to lose their mother tongue within two generations. In this talk, I will introduce how Meinong implements Hakka-Mandarin Bilingual Education and effective strategies of language acquisition planning to reverse the Hakka language’s shifting to Mandarin.
Meinong has now become the only area in Taiwan where the Hakka language loss has been successfully controlled in the school contexts. It is hoped that the progress of the Meinong Hakka revitalization and the bilingual approaches applied in Hakka language maintenance can empower people who are committed to saving endangered languages in many other places in the world.
Speaker's Biography
Professor Chen-Cheng Chun
Chen-Cheng Chun is a professor of the Graduate Institute of Teaching Chinese as a Second/Foreign Language at National Kaohsiung Normal University in Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Language, Reading & Culture at the University of Arizona.
His major areas are language planning, bilingualism, second language acquisition, and literacy. He is the founder of ISCLE (International School Chinese Language Education Conference) and ATLH (Association of Taiwan Lai-Qu Huayu). He has been researching immigrant and transnational students, Hakka language revitalization, and bilingual/bicultural/biliterate planning in various international and local school contexts since 2003.
Several of his language policy research findings and suggestions have been accepted and legislated by the central and local governments of Taiwan. He is currently serving as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Chinese Language Teaching and as board member on local and international language education committees.
