What’s wrong with Hong Kong’s English language education?

Tiffany Suen

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May 4, 2020

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• 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

1. foster real and two-way interchange among students. They resort to imparting knowledge through lecturing,
2. 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 information in a piece of writing only, rather than to analyze and appreciate its style of delivery and presentation.
• Students are not inspired to immerse themselves in the cultures of English speaking countries. They often learn English from textbooks, rather than real life, or at least multimedia materials that bear a closer resemblance to real-life interactions.
• Students believe that they should learn words and expressions by memorization rather than creation. Many of them don’t feel comfortable learning a phrase or a word by trial and error.
• Students either have the misguided notion that they do not have to bother pronouncing a word in a comprehensible way at all or that they must speak in a ‘pure’ RP accent.
• Students see English as a subject that they have to study, rather than a skill that they can practise.
• Students feel the pressure to learn English to survive in the education market as commodities. They never see English as something that’s fun to learn or a life-skill that will allow them to rise up to the various challenges and thrive in life.

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