User:Mike.yuxuan/sandbox

The draft for the Cantonese article, written jointly by Yu Xuan Chen, Sharon Gao and Serena Li is in Serena's sandbox.

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From a survey that was conducted in 1992, most Chinese immigrants (about seven out of ten) settle in Toronto or Scarborough. Out of these two locations, new immigrants tend to choose the latter one, while immigrants who have been living in Canada for over 10 years tend to inhabit in the city of Toronto. Note that among the population of Chinese who newly migrated to Canada during 1992, a large portion of them is from Hong Kong, possibly due to the unstable economic the political status in Hong Kong(i.e. China is planning to gain back control over Hong Kong from the British government). Among the new immigrants the majority of them during the time is within the working range (25 - 44) and about two third of participants of the survey are married. In terms of education level, 83.9% of the population has the education degree higher or equal to high school, however, more than 50% of the surveyed group have not received formal education in Canada. As to the economic status, most of the household has the annual income between 25k - 50k with the majority in high income group as to low income group. However, four out of five in the surveyed population were in the labour force instead of professions like lawyer or doctors despite the amount of time they inhabit in Canada. In addition, the report explicitly stated that "To a large extent, the respondents were unable to realize the career goals they had held before coming to Canada"(p 10). The profile also indicated that two third of the respondents report that their current occupation differs from their pre-immigration professional and it is mainly due to language inefficiency and racial discrimination, which are the two main barriers to employment.

Another study was conducted in Mrs.L's class room where 11 of 28 students are first generation immigrants from Hong Kong to observe how does speaking Cantonese influence a student success in academic study. It was observed that, the Chinese students who speak their heritage language creates a "language boundary" within the Cantonese speaking group of students. That they communicates with the members in the group with Cantonese and English with outsiders of the group. From the interview with Mrs. L, it is concluded that the reason why Chinese students choose to speak their heritage language with the group is mainly for gaining friendship as well as assistance in the daily academic work in order to achieve higher grade for university and college entrance. In some settings where 3 to 4 Cantonese students were placed with few non-Cantonese speaking students, the Cantonese students often only communicates and work with students who speaks their heritage language, and the non-Cantonese student is often being excluded from the discussion. Speaking English within the Cantonese group is consider to be "showing off their English ability". The occurrence of this phenomenon is possibly due to the fact that English is the dominant language and it represents a figure of power.

In 2009, a research is being done to find out how the relationship between motivation and learning Chinese as a heritage language. In the result, there are three factors that contributes to a Chinese student's connection to one's culture: family, education institution and society. These factors play roles that influence Chinese descendant's emotional attachment(i.e. pride, interest in learning heritage language) to their ethnic background. Interestingly, contact with Chinese culture in a sense raise the awareness of students to their cultural identity. A research conducted by Chow indicated that although language schools do not directly result in vast improvement of the language skill, but it increases the students emotional attachments to the Chinese culture. In this research, questionnaires were distributed to hundreds of university students who were enrolled in Chinese language learning course. There are three groups of interest, despite the group that was consisted with members not from a Chinese background, one of the groups being asked to fill out questionnaires declare themselves to be Chinese, or "Chinese-Canadian"(Chinese-Chinese group). Note that the member of this group consisted of university students who has at least one of the parents to be native Chinese speaker and themselves speak Chinese (or variety of Chinese) as their mother tongue. On the other hand, another group of students declared themselves to be Canadian and has English as their mother tongue.(English-Chinese group). People who were identified as Chinese-Chinese group were found tend to have intrinsic motivation in taking Chinese- language learning course in university while the English-Chinese group has similar result. At the end, the research concluded that "there are virtually no motivational differences between HL learners who declare Chinese as a mother tongue and those who declare English as their mother tongue.", indicating the interest of learning heritage language for Chinese in GTA area is independent of their mother tongue.