Teaching Chinese in Mandarin blamed as Hong Kong pupils struggle with higher level reading skills
Experts also attributed it to drilling culture in Hong Kong and did not rule out an excessive focus on Territory-wide System Assessment
High-level Chinese reading skills among Hong Kong pupils have got worse, while more basic skills have improved, a new international literacy study has found.
Experts believed the drop in standards in skills such as interpreting, integrating and evaluating could be the result of using Mandarin to teach Chinese language. They also attributed it to the drilling culture in Hong Kong and did not rule out an excessive focus on an unpopular competence assessment – the Territory-wide System Assessment (TSA).
According to the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study 2016, which assessed the reading comprehension of Primary Four pupils in 50 countries and regions, Hong Kong respondents scored an average of 568 for both their high-level and low-level reading skills. A total of 3,533 pupils from 139 primary schools took part in the research.
While the figure for low-level skills, such as retrieval and making straightforward inferences, was an improvement from 562 in the 2011 assessment, that for high-level was a drop from 578 in 2011.
“About 70 per cent of schools have swapped to Mandarin to teach Chinese [in recent years], so [teachers] may have spent more time on pronunciation and less on discussions,” said Professor Tse Shek-kam, from the University of Hong Kong’s faculty of education and the principal investigator for the Hong Kong section of the report.