I refer to the article headlined, 'Right to a good bilingual education', by Professor Evelyn Man Yee-fun (South China Morning Post, August 2).
Professor Man said: 'When students have had a weak foundation in English at primary school, learning at secondary level in English is bound to present problems . . . Unless considerable resources are redirected to language teachers and teaching at the primary level and junior secondary levels, remedies will be too little too late.' I would go one step further and submit that considerable resources should be directed to English teaching in the pre-school and kindergarten level. Children at a young age actually can learn to speak a foreign language faster than any adult, if they are immersed in an environment where that language is spoken to them constantly.
Actually, it takes no effort for children to become bilingual or multi-lingual if they constantly play with children of other nationalities.
If the correct teachers, curriculum and teaching methods are used starting from the pre-school stage, all our primary school students can attain quite a reasonable standard of English by the time they graduate from Primary Six. Then, the workload of teachers and therefore resources required for English teaching will be much reduced in the secondary school stage.
At present, our primary school students have an extremely heavy workload, but mostly they are learning by rote a lot of information which either will be out of date quickly or is not useful to them at their present or future stage in life.
The primary school curriculum should be designed mainly to build into our students a solid foundation in Chinese, English, mathematics and ethics. All other subjects, such as general science, history, geography, etc, should be taught as fun subjects designed to stimulate interest rather than the way they are taught now - to be memorised for the purpose of getting good grades in exams so that one can get into a better secondary school.