Education | Training to improve Chinese-Portuguese fluency in human resource teams

Aspect of Friday’s meeting, presided by Secretary for Social Affairs and Culture, Alexis Tam

Over the next five years, the government will implement new measures to train more members within human resource teams to be able to speak both Chinese and Portuguese in order to better serve the city. The Education and Youth Affairs Bureau (DSEJ) made the announcement on Friday at the conclusion of a meeting held between the non-tertiary education committee and the youth affairs committee of the DSEJ.
Tang Wai Keong, director of the DSEJ president’s office, told the media that the government will expand its support in order to train Chinese and Portuguese speaking human resources. Currently, scholarships are offered only to students of Chinese and Portuguese translation, but the future additional measures will expand to training human resources in finance, accounting and engineering fields, Tang informed.
The goal of the expansion is to aid the commercial and trade cooperation between China and Portuguese-speaking countries. Tang elaborated on this point, saying, “scholarships will help in training talented people, particularly in regards with finance and accounting, for the China and Portuguese-speaking countries trade platform. In the past, we were already paying close attention to Portuguese-speaking talented people. This year, more scholarships will be arranged to support them. The government will continue to invest and support the training of talented people in learning how to speak Portuguese.”
According to Tang, starting from the academic year of 2016/2017, the Portuguese classes will be given priority within the educational curricula in local schools. This is a measure written in the SAR’s Five-Year plan.
Schools will be required to have a minimum number of hours of Portuguese courses. In addition, more private schools will add Portuguese courses to their educational programmes and lectures will use Portuguese as the language of instruction.
The cooperation between Macau and Portugal regarding education will mean that courses and departments evolve, and in the long term this will ensure a pathway for Macau resident students who want to pursue tertiary degrees in Portugal.
Increased scholarship quotas will also be assigned to the tertiary education section in order to support college leavers choosing Portuguese as their university major. The scholarship will also apply to students choosing Chinese-Portuguese translation courses.
More subsidies will be provided to teachers and students to participate in exams to obtain professional certificates, including Portuguese proficiency certificates. As revealed by Tang, the DSEJ has been preparing the establishment of a language training center, located at Seac Pai Van.
Friday’s DSEJ meeting introduced a middle-term review of the ten-year non-tertiary education development. The review shows that during 2011 to 2014, the government investments in non-tertiary education increased 15.2 percent. In the academic year of 2013/2014, gross high school enrolment rate was 92.5 percent, compared to 82.7 percent in the academic year of 2010/2011; university enrolment rate was 90.2 percent, 4.3 percent more than that of 2010/2011.
The grade retention in primary school, middle school and high school recorded at 2.5 percent, 8.5 percent, and 3.4 percent in the year of 2013/2014, respectively, compared to 4.2 percent, 11.8 percent and 4.8 percent of the academic year of 2010/2011. Julie Zhou