A Holistic Home-School-Community Model for Learning Chinese Language

Book excerpt: This book contains the compilation of studies from a 5-year project aimed at improving the Chinese teaching and learning as a second language, for non-Chinese speaking preschoolers in Hong Kong. In this project, a home-school-community model was used in an attempt to address the teaching and learning of Chinese for non-Chinese speaking preschoolers, moving from a traditional school centred teaching approach to a holistic approach. This allows them to learn in the same space and environment on the same topics, creating an inclusive classroom that does not compromise the teaching and learning of Chinese for both local and non-Chinese speaking preschoolers. Issues such as medium of instruction, language progression, silent period, multicultural teaching assistants, multilingual learning facilitators, parent changes, and effective teaching are studied and discussed.