First Language

Letters

3 Feb 2009

UN report proves mother tongue is best

Government's language policy has proved to be disastrous

21 Jan 2009

Over the last 10 years we have witnessed innumerable changes of government policies.

Often policies implemented have had to be scrapped since they had not been thoroughly...

Q & A

23 Jun 2007

My daughter is in a Primary Three class at an English-speaking international school. She only speaks English and children in the playground often speak in different languages so she is unable to...

Tongue-tied

30 Mar 2004

Acting Education Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam has been a busy man. In the last few weeks, he has slaughtered a few education sacred cows: streaming, school rankings and mother-tongue grades as...

Language problems

23 Jul 2002

In his letter to these columns on July 17, Bill Wong expressed support for mother-tongue teaching in Hong Kong.

I am a Form Seven student and I attend a mother-tongue school. However...

Opinion

Alex Lo

Relaxing maids' live-in rule means less room for conflict

Jake Van Der Kamp

Excessive caution leaves reserves going to waste

Howard Winn

HSBC pays big bonuses while admitting to money laundering

At home with English

Controversy over schools' demands under the native English teachers scheme, much discussed in whispers and related through unsourced anecdotes, has finally emerged in concrete form.

Mother-tongue teaching the best option

I refer to your editorial of July 9 headlined 'Mother-tongue merits'.

I fully agree with you that using mother tongue as the medium of instruction in schools has its advantages.

Procedure a waste of taxpayers' money

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...

Lesson in English loss

There has been much discussion in this newspaper about mother-tongue teaching.

Parents' views ignored

Mother tongue is the best teaching medium.

Mother-tongue publicity 'selective and biased'

Official publicity for mother-tongue education has outraged parents and students, who said it was selective and biased.

More than $1 million was spent on the publicity, which...