Letters | If Hong Kong schools teach English badly, no wonder students end up being no good at it
- Schools are ignoring the educational needs of some students in Hong Kong who don’t understand enough English to get through a class taught entirely in English. In fact, studies have shown that teaching English bilingually is effective
As a former substitute English teacher, I saw how senior form students were unable to construct complicated sentences, even though they had been learning English for over a decade.
A large number of them could not even produce simple sentences that were grammatical. Besides the education system, I think one deep-rooted problem is that schools have ignored the educational needs of students and taught the language in an inefficient way.
I remember how, when I was teaching an article about the housing problem in Hong Kong, a lot of my students were frustrated by the difficult words and complicated syntax. However, teachers were required to teach in English only, which meant that even though our students did not understand a word or sentence structure, we were supposed to explain it in English.
This was where the problem arose. The students were already demotivated because they did not know what the article was about. Then the teachers had to use a language the students were not good at to explain something they were not interested in. The result was that the students did not even want to listen and simply gave up.
Knowing that my students were struggling to understand the article, I tried to read each sentence aloud in English and translate it into Cantonese. Whenever they were confused by a complicated sentence structure, I explained it to them in Cantonese. That appeared to motivate them and they even proactively wrote down some useful notes for reference.