The learning and teaching of Cantonese as a second language (edited by Siu-lun Lee): Teaching Cantonese tones to international university students in Hong Kong (Ch.9)

When intonational language speakers (e.g. English and Korean) learn a lexical
tone language (e.g. Cantonese and Thai), they may have difficulty in perceiving
and producing tones accurately, in particular those belonging to the
contour type. Multimodal materials, such as audiovisual cues and gestures,
have been adopted in Mandarin tone teaching, and recent studies tend to
show that gesture is an effective pedagogical means (e.g. Baills et al., 2019;
Chen, 2013). With this in mind, a structural approach has been developed for
teaching Cantonese tones to intonational language speakers at a university
in Hong Kong. In this approach, the teaching of tones is divided into three
phases: introduction, training and revision. The first phase gives students
some background about Cantonese tone height and direction. Students learn
to produce Cantonese tones in three activities with increasing complexity.
Multimodal teaching resources are used in these activities, including aural
practices, visual cues and gestures. The final phase offers students a self- access
e- learning package for revision. This package includes a summary of the content
covered in the previous two phases, supplemented with audio files and
short video clips, as well as test items for knowledge self- check.