Welcome to the RCLEAMS website.

RCLEAMS was established in 2007 and was upgraded to an Institute-level research centre in 2009 at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. Our mission is to study multilingual acquisition, language contact and the respective roles of languages, especially in contexts where the languages are not cognate and where the scripts are often different. We seek to undertake research which will inform governments and language education policy makers.

In the Hong Kong context, the fundamental question to be researched is how we can best encourage children to become trilingual in Cantonese, English and Putonghua, and biliterate in Chinese and English. How can the school curriculum be best organized and delivered to allow children to develop as biliterate multilinguals?

In the regional context, where English is playing an increasingly important role in all school and university curricula, we seek to consider ways in which English can be taught alongside local languages in a complementary way, rather than replacing them. Above all, we seek to support and validate the multilingual in today’s world.

We encourage like-minded scholars and researchers to contact us, and a list of our current partners can be seen in the relevant section of our webpage.