'My doctor is in the sour': Hong Kong report highlights common mistakes by local pupils in English exam
Report highlights errors in English exam and blames lack of exposure to 'authentic' material
Some pupils used the Cantonese expression "la" to end sentences and struggled with pronunciation in their oral university entrance exams in English, according to an examiner's report.
Common errors included pronouncing "daughter" as "doctor", "robot" as "Robert", "lack" as "lick", and "shower" as "sour", according to the report on the Diploma of Secondary Education English exam released yesterday.
It also found that some pupils tended to use "Chinese-influenced" English when speaking - a direct translation of the Chinese language structure, which resulted in grammatically incorrect English. Examples include "I very enjoy it" and "foreign country people".
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About 68,700 candidates took the exam earlier this year, with a 79.3 per cent pass rate.
Examiners found that many pupils in the written component used certain vocabulary and stock phrases inappropriately in the hope of impressing markers.
"It is conspicuous that we should do something to wrestle with the aforementioned rub," was one such example. The candidate in fact meant: "It is clear that we should do something to consider the previously discussed problem."
Some resorted to clichés such as "every coin has two sides" and "a blessing or a curse?"