During the chief executive election campaign, candidate Alan Leong Kah-kit took incumbent Donald Tsang Yam-kuen to task for not implementing small-class teaching. The pair crossed swords over the amount of resources required. Yet they missed a fundamental question: what is small-class teaching intended to achieve? If the purpose of pushing it is to create more jobs for teachers, I would argue that the good cause is being promoted for the wrong reason. As the purpose must be to increase the educational benefits to students, we must examine closely what benefits small-class teaching brings, and how to make it work. As a recent graduate and a parent, I know small classes are of paramount importance in the teaching of a foreign language. At a well-resourced university such as Stanford, a new section is set up as soon as the number of students in a foreign-language class exceeds 20. But the aim is not to give the instructor an easy time: it is to enable the teacher to pay intensive, personalised attention to each student and make sure each one is adequately drilled in grammar, composition, speaking and listening. Students of small language classes not only have a heavy workload, but also regular grammar and vocabulary quizzes, two mid-term exams and a final exam. Parents pay a premium to send their children to international schools in Hong Kong, prestigious boarding schools in Britain and prep schools in the US so they can benefit from more thorough and in-depth small-class teaching. But small classes work only with sufficient well-qualified, well-trained and well-motivated teachers. Do we have enough teachers with the requisite modern training to lead such small-class education? Lack of small-class teaching is only the tip of the iceberg of our educational woes. Concerned middle-class parents can draw up a lengthy laundry list. At the top is the much-denigrated decline in language proficiency, in English and Chinese. Nowadays, it is not uncommon to find high-school graduates or even undergraduates who cannot differentiate between a noun and a verb, let alone transitive and intransitive verbs, definite and indefinite articles. Whereas older Hongkongers like myself were drilled in English grammar and encouraged to read widely, for some strange reason our educational authorities have decided to adopt a 'communicative' approach in the teaching of English, de-emphasising grammar and producing students not sufficiently schooled in the basics. I would argue that a communicative approach, which relies heavily on the interaction of the learner with the environment, does not work in Hong Kong, where we now have a strong Cantonese-speaking environment and culture. While children of my generation grew up watching Disney cartoons in English and listening to western pop songs, local children today watch Cantonese soap operas, imbibe Canto-pop songs, and read tabloids and weekly gossip magazines. We cannot teach English as though it were our mother tongue; nor can we pretend that we can teach children to speak, read and write English as though they were growing up in an English-language environment. This is indeed where Hong Kong and Singapore differ in language education: by virtue of the fact that Singapore is more ethnically and culturally diverse, and the Chinese community does not have a dominant dialect comparable to Cantonese in Hong Kong, there is more incentive for Singaporeans to learn and use English as the lingua franca in their everyday lives. Hong Kong has no alternative but to recognise that we ought to teach English as a second language and go back to the basics of rigorous instructor-centred, grammar-based instruction, complemented by programmes for immersion in an English-language environment, such as study abroad. Foreign-language mastery provides us with a window on the world. Hong Kong cannot remain a 'world city' if it loses its English-language mastery. If we do not want to become 'just another Chinese city', upgrading our English language proficiency is an urgent task. Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee is chairperson of the Savantas Policy Institute
