What’s wrong with Hong Kong’s English language education?
2 min readMay 4, 2020
- Students are encouraged by star tutors to sprinkle stock phrases and expressions onto their writing so as to impress examiners. Students spend the time that they could have spent on regurgitation rather than on understanding how English actually works.
- Students are more concerned with what is the correct language rather than what feels right and what reads beautiful.
- Students have little appreciation for the English language as an art.
- Students are rarely encouraged to work on and inculcate their higher-order thinking skills such as imagination, creativity and critical thinking.
- They have ever only been taught to distinguish right and wrong.
- Teachers either don’t have the time, resources, permission, or expertise (cultural, literary and general knowledge) to
- foster real and two-way interchange among students. They resort to imparting knowledge through lecturing,
- to make English lessons interesting, engaging or even exciting.
- Students are obsessed with hacks, skills, and formulae that will allow them to locate the right answer and figure out the ‘best’ way to answer a question as if there were one.
- Students are often trained to locate…