ABSTRACT
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.
