It is the middle of the Hong Kong academic year and the mid-year examination season in most schools. Like many of my native English-speaking teacher (NET) colleagues, I am tasting the delights of multiple exam supervision sessions and the marking of scores of papers.
NETs help to prepare and will mark all English exams, which run the gamut from heavy grammar content-laden general English papers to listening, composition, dictation and reading skills papers.
The English examinations that we NETs tend to be associated with are the oral examinations. We have sometimes been told that we have been hired to serve as the Hong Kong English curriculum's speaking experts, so we may often set the oral English papers. We may well get by with a little help from our friends - past oral exam papers, especially at the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE) level. In addition, we usually administer our schools' oral exams, and often serve as the markers and post-examination assessors.
Hence, we may find ourselves doing everything from asking younger students which flavour ice cream they prefer to interrogating senior students on the state of governance in Hong Kong for their individual presentations - questions we might be hard-pressed to answer ourselves. Our job throughout the year, therefore, is to give students the tools to express themselves fluently in clear, standard English.
The advantage of having a native speaker handle the oral English programme at a given school is that the native speaker should know what sounds natural and convincing in English. For example, many of us as NETs have found that local tutorial schools teach Hong Kong students the phrase "Thank you for your question" to lead off their individual presentations during HKDSE-level oral exams. However, this is a phrase which would be more suited to a television interview rather than an oral exam.
"Thank you for your question," an insincere politician might coo to a television interviewer, all the while smiling smarmily to the camera in an effort to connect to all the good people out there at home glued to their TV sets.
Sometimes textbook English can model ludicrously artificial patterns