Macao volunteers teach Portuguese in Guizhou

A volunteer team from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Macao recently visited three schools in Congjiang county – located in Southwest China's Guizhou province – and provided Portuguese courses to raise the interest of students in Portugal's language and its culture.

The Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) has a long history of cultural engagement with Portugal which stretches back over 400 years. China resumed its exercise of sovereignty over Macao in December 1999 and Portuguese and Chinese are the official languages of the region.

The courses were part of a poverty alleviation cooperation agreement signed between the Macao government and Liaison Office of the Central People's Government in the Macao SAR.

The volunteer team included one professor and 10 doctoral students and master's students. They offered courses to more than 100 students at Congjiang's Dadai Primary School, No 2 Ethnic Middle School and Congjiang Vocational-technical School.

After three weeks of study, the students are able to have basic conversations in Portuguese and even learned to sing some Portuguese songs.

Zhou Haitao, principal of Congjiang's No 2 Ethnic Middle School, said that the courses not only helped the students to learn a new language, but also inspired the school's teachers in terms of teaching and learning methods applicable to other courses.