16/11/2017 On Teaching Reading

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 of promoting extensive reading. We make use of online platforms like Schoology and Edmodo so that learning can take place outside the classrooms. Teachers will upload several articles (apart from SCMP which each student has to subscribe) per month and students have to read them and respond to some short questions online. I think this way is one of the means to help students read more extensively outside school.