Just imagine a business manager who knows the names of every one of his 26 employees, but has no idea what jobs they do. He will probably see Tan, Wong and Jones working together quite often, but never Tan and Leung.
He would have to memorise the lists of people he needed to attend his meetings, but he wouldn't know why each person needed to be there. Bad management? You bet, but such is the daily 'management style' taught to most of Hong Kong's young learners of English.
These students know precious little about the 'jobs' performed by the 26 letters of the alphabet. Our students regularly bring groups of letters together, but they have very little idea why these combinations occur.
This low level of 'management' is compounded by the fact that many of the 'names' that our students use would not be recognised outside Hong Kong. Our children are too often taught that 'letters' are called 'alphabets', that 'words' are called 'vocabularies', and that 'L' is 'ello', 'R' is 'arlo' and 'Z' is 'ee-zed'.
Students enrolled in the English Immersion Programme at Hong Kong International School this summer are being taught some better alphabetic management skills in the course known as Word Wizards. This three-week course directly addresses the yawning gaps in Hong Kong students' knowledge of English.
The course begins with a brief study of etymology, during which the students discover that English words, like people, have family trees that may include German, French, Greek, Arabic or Sanskrit ancestors. Incredibly, the students seem unaware that Greek and Latin roots are so widespread and that 'tele-' means 'far', 'photo-' means 'light' or 'aqua-' means water.