Despite widespread professional and official advice against the continuation of this practice, it is still de rigueur in almost every English-language classroom in the city.

So, what's wrong with 'seen dictation'?

In Hong Kong, this practice of memorising textbook passages for dictation has been directly borrowed from traditional Chinese-language teaching, where the memorisation of character construction and character combinations is an essential aspect of learning a highly ornate and complex written script.

But written English has a completely different foundation from that of the Chinese script.

If students only had more knowledge of the direct correspondence between the sounds and the letters of written English, they would be able to 'work out' the script (the spelling) for themselves.

But sadly, very few Hong Kong learners of English have acquired this powerful decoding skill. This is precisely what lies behind the often-heard Hong Kong question: 'How to spell?'

There's no doubt that English-language learning can benefit immensely from some forms of dictation, but this needs to be quite different from Chinese-script memorisation.

My young bus companion was working so hard on committing some passage to memory that he was nodding his head and tightly closing his eyes.

I touched his arm and asked him if he had a 'dictation test', and he replied, 'Yes. Very difficult'. When I looked across at the paper in his hands, I could hardly believe my eyes.

The text that he was straining to memorise was indeed difficult. It was none other than Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky! While this intriguing but difficult poem might be good fun to read aloud, it is highly inappropriate for any teacher to use it for 'seen dictation'. Is it any wonder the poor lad was struggling to remember its spelling sequences?

The very next day, I met the same boy on the bus again. I asked him how his dictation test had gone. His face dropped, as he told me that his teacher had been 'too busy' to give the test and that it would take place 'today'.

I tried to boost his confidence by suggesting that more learning time was a good thing. I asked him to read me some of the poem. He looked at me strangely and said: 'No. For dictation.' I then read a small section aloud, but that seemed to render him even more uncomfortable than ever.

I let him nod and mouth his way through the spelling of 's-l-i-t-h-y t-o-v-e-s' and 'b-o-r-o-g-r-o-v-e-s'. I realised that his predicament was even worse than I had at first thought. He was not even saying the strange words to himself. No. He was mouthing the spelling sequences of these purely nonsensical constructions.

What a sad, counterproductive farce! The Jabberwocky is probably the greatest nonsense poem in the English language. For English speakers, it is a playful, verbal romp, in which the sounds of cleverly invented words convey the meaning.

For advanced students of English, it could be used in a variety of ways. It lends itself to dramatisation, artistic interpretation and choral performance. It could even function as a reading test to ascertain whether a student can decode its unusual, but eminently readable 'new words'.

I still wonder how the teacher of the boy on the bus 'performed' the reading of this poem during the dictation exercise, and whether she would set the usual lists of 'corrections' afterwards.

Callooh! Callay! Callooh! Callay! What an absurd exercise in sheer nonsense.

PAULINE BUNCE, Heng Fa Chuen

Practise makes perfect in quest for good results

To do well in an exam, especially a public exam, sufficient knowledge and constant practise are indispensable. Just having the necessary knowledge without adequate practise cannot guarantee good results.

In fact, most candidates who sit the HKCEE or the HKALE have at least some knowledge about the subjects they take. However, not many can get good grades. Some even badly fail most subjects.

Being a veteran teacher, I have come across many students who wishfully think they are cleverer and better than others, and thus do not need to have routine and monotonous practise. I have also come across quite a number of students who realise they are not good enough and thus work extra hard. It turns out that very often both batches of students get unexpected results. The only difference is that the former usually gets worse results while the latter often gets better results.

As the saying goes: 'Practise makes perfect'. This may sound a bit old-fashioned but it still holds true.

Twenty years' teaching experience tells me that given two students whose English standards are more or less the same, the one who has frequent and serious practise usually performs better than the one who does not.

So, if you want to get good grades in the exam, you should practise frequently and seriously, no matter how 'clever' or 'good' you already are. On the other hand, as long as you are determined to do better, you can certainly make improvement, no matter how 'dumb' or 'bad' you think you are. Remember what I say: no one is doomed to failure unless they give up on themselves.

RON CHIU, English teacher, Tak Sun Secondary School