Punctuation is an issue in international schools, where teachers are noticing declining standards. But local teachers are more concerned about students' overall English skills - in reading, writing, speaking and listening.
James Hon Lin-shan, an English teacher at Ng Siu Mui Secondary School, Kwai Chung, said: 'Students are reading less and less, their vocabulary is becoming weaker and their speaking ability is declining. But punctuation is not the most notable problem.'
Mr Hon said he did not focus on punctuation in his teaching. 'We teach it as part of grammar,' he said. 'For example, we don't teach use of the apostrophe as such. We just teach the words that are easily confused, such as its and it's or whose and who's.
'When it comes to writing, we teach the use of some major punctuation marks - commas, full stops, exclamation marks and question marks - and these do not cause too much trouble for students.' Students were more sloppy in their e-mails, omitting punctuation, he said.
Pauline Bunce, a humanities teacher at Hong Kong International School and a former native-English speaking teacher, said: 'We have quite a big problem with students writing incomplete sentences without a verb or a subject or object.
'They are just phrases strung together. Kids will try to write as they speak and the two are different. We do teach punctuation incidentally. It is done on the spot rather than in a separate lesson.'