As someone closely involved in the teacher-benchmarking project, I'm afraid I cannot agree with the reassurances from Ho Wing-hung, of the Education Department, concerning the oral section of the benchmark test (letter, South China Morning Post, March 15).
The oral section has been called an 'insult' to native-speaker teachers. Due to poor exemption criteria, I feel this is unfortunately so.
If the native-speaker teachers concerned had had degrees in English, they would have been exempted from the test. However, most English degrees, at least in the UK, are focused on literature, not language. This does not imply the slightest bit of language awareness, nor any ability to teach. Despite Ms Ho's assurances, the test is fundamentally concerned with language proficiency, not teaching ability. As this is the case, a much more sensible criteria for exemption should be whether or not one has English as his or her first language.
Furthermore, the existing procedure of mixing native-speaking and local candidates in the group discussion task in the test can actually work in detriment to the latter. Young, often shy, pre-service local teachers are unlikely to perform well with a native speaker in such a high-stress situation.
Of course, all teachers should be linguistically aware and properly trained. The current procedure requiring certain native-speaking teachers to be benchmarked is however a waste of taxpayers' money, while also putting some local teachers at a disadvantage.
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