In matters concerning education, the HK SAR government has taken two important measures, namely "mother-tongue teaching" on the one hand and "promotion of the use of computers and IT in schools" on the other. Looking closer into the situation, the first measure leads to the ideal of "biliteracy and trilingualism", while the second measure arouses concern for a consistent promotion of software and educational information to match the abundance of hardware now already in place.

Recognizing the importance of the above two issues, we see here and now the possibility as well as the necessity of bringing these two ends together by employing the latest information technology to provide useful and practical language-educational tools in service of our local need, namely, in service of the ideal of biliteracy and trilingualism.

This project aims at producing a series of online syllabaries, lexicons and databases in support of the teaching and learning of Chinese and English. With good track record in the past, the project team will make every effort to ensure that their products are user-friendly, search-flexible, and material-substantial. The project considers the secondary as well as the primary school sectors as her main target clienteles.

Over the next biennium, besides the technical, computational part of the work, the project team will get in touch with the school sector by sending them publicity brochures, organizing orientation workshops, give onsite demonstrations, help set up "hot links", entering into collaborative efforts with targeted schools, and collecting back questionnaires etc. All these will be done with the sole aim of conveying to teachers and students the message that the use of IT in language teaching and learning is interesting, effective, and rewarding.

Deliverables of the project will include but not limited to the following:

1. A new and empowered version of a talking syllabary of Cantonese

2. Online edition of Lin Yu-tang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage

3. An Integrated Database for Chinese Language Usage (including Putonghua support and many other educational modules)

4. A number of topic-specific web pages related to language education in the Hong Kong context

The work related to the project will be evaluated through a number of channels: access counters, ranking results of leading Internet consortia such as Lycos, Yahoo, and McCrawler, dialogue box records, feedback and questionnaires collected from the school sector, internal reviews by a steering committee etc.

For the completion of the project, we are applying for a sum of HK$1,999,000 to be injected into the project over the biennium span from June 1999 to May 2001.