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Letters | Improving Hong Kong students’ English skills requires a team effort
- Readers discuss the state of English language education in Hong Kong, who bears responsibility for improvement and how schools can foster learning outside class
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Two letters on this page, “Hong Kong schools should use renewed secondary curriculum to address students’ preferences” and “English classes fail to meet students’ needs” (September 28), put me in mind of a saying popularly credited to Irish poet William Butler Yeats: “Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.”
Student Alice Chan laments that secondary school English classes leave students unprepared for the future and in doing so drags her bucket and places it at the feet of her English teachers.
The other letter is from Kelly Cheng Hui-kiu, a member of Youth Ideas, a research centre under the Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups. It stresses that the opportunities provided by the renewed senior secondary curriculum for students to extend the breadth of their learning and in doing so become lifelong, self-directed learners.
The juxtaposition of the two letters is instructional. Teachers and schools doubtless have an essential role in implementing the renewed curriculum, but students must also realise they need to leave their bucket behind and instead change their mindset and turn up to school with pockets of kindling.
Fire needs fuel, heat and oxygen. The renewed curriculum will provide heat and oxygen and some fuel, but secondary students must be prepared to add their own fuel and in doing so take more responsibility for their own learning.
Sarah Rigby, Lantau Island
Students must bear responsibility for poor English skills
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