Francesca @ PGDE English SCT

Students in Hong Kong, from my perspective, lack intensive and extensive reading, unless they have already developed their habits since childhood. At school, students are taught comprehension passages in a boring way. Teachers often explain words and summarise ideas; then students move to comprehension questions. As a result, reading lessons are not interesting to both the students and teachers. I have not come up with clues that can help me teach reading effectively and interestingly. However, I would try to include some videos and higher-order questions, like evaluating tone and attitude and making inferences, to motivate them to think beyond the passage. I always believe that they should go beyond the test and DSE, and be more interested in reading. Students at my schools are encouraged to read newspaper and English books during morning reading sessions. In class, I try to spare a few minutes to read newspaper with them. Now, we have a new initiative at school with the hope...

Students are aware that they have to acquire vocabulary items for communicative purpose. However, they normally do it passively despite the fact that they can actually learn different new words on their own with the advent of technology. In order to stimulate students' interest in vocabulary learning, teachers can try to pick vocab items that are relevant to their daily life. Besides, it is also important to teach vocab items in a lively way instead of providing dictionary explanations to students only. One way I think it may be useful in teaching vocab is to relate the words to students by using them as the examples. In this way, they might be able to remember and recall the items in the future. Yet, students should also play their part in vocabulary acquisition. One way to do so is definitely related to reading. Reading different genres and reading different themes will help them in language and vocabulary building. From reading, they will be able to learn words from con...