Let Cantonese Teaching Go Globally and Visually

This paper will outline two major on-going initiatives of the Chinese Language Centre, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, on digital transformation in Cantonese language education for foreign learners. The first initiative is the development of MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on Cantonese for beginners, which is the first of its kind around the world. Despite being a Chinese dialect, Cantonese (Yue Chinese) ranked 18th among world languages with 84.5 million native speakers and 400,000 second language learners. It is widely used in Lingnan area of China, and there is a considerable population of heritage speakers globally. The MOOC aims to offer an opportunity for global learners who are interested in this language. The MOOC will be based on our rich experience in Cantonese pedagogy with the introduction of multimodal elements. The other initiative to be introduced is the enhancement of an e-learning tool for Cantonese learners to master its sound system particularly on the tone. The most special feature of the tool is that we try to make the complicated tone system of Cantonese easy to learn by visualizing it, for we assume that visualization is the key to the learning of tone for learners whose native language is non-tonal.