Springvale English Language Centre

The first school we paid visit to is Springvale English Language Centre (SELC). Students in SELC have very diverse nationalities, they are mainly refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, Sudan, Burma and China. It aims at enhancing students’ literacy and numeracy through communicative learning approach and learning experience approach.

From the diverse cultural backgrounds we can foresee the most probable problems encountered in English Language teaching would be how to teach small children who have varied standards of literacy proper English and stop them from speaking in their first languages. In order to cater for the different needs of students, the school has streamed the students according to their levels of English instead of age which is the approach Hong Kong adopting. The class I went to would be 10 children ranging around Grades 1-3, comprises of six nationalities, and their levels of English are vary quite a bit. The teacher focuses on vocabularies and pronunciation, and put little emphasis on grammar items. She starts by drilling the class the vocabularies of dates. She makes use of the word cards she prepares, pronounces very clearly the words and the students follow her. She then moves on to the letter of the week – F.

She is teaching the students the ff sound and vocabularies begin with F. She points at the pictures of items begin with F, and asks the students to tell her the words. Very often, she repeats the consonant sounds so as to make them very clear to the students. After reading a big book, she ends the lesson by grouping the students into small groups. The groups are grouped according to students’ levels of English and they are assigned different tasks – completing reading worksheets, playing alphabet games and using computers to listen to and read stories. The homework given to students are as well vary with regard to their levels. For example, the more capable students would be making sentences with given words, while the less capable ones would be asked to do copying of sentences only.

The approach SELC adopts is good in a sense that it caters for different needs of students, and makes learning English more effective and efficient. However, this way of teaching would not be very feasible in Hong Kong. The class size of Hong Kong is big, and students are streamed with regard to their age. The number of teachers and their levels of English would also hinder us from doing so. And that the education system of Hong Kong is exam-oriented, it would not be of students’ benefit if schools are putting the emphasis mostly on pronunciation. Schools tend to teach grammar in early primary schools explicitly, which is a contrast to SELC, and students are made to do the same kind of homework irrespective of their standards. It may be good in terms of not categorizing or labeling students’ ability, but may be further dragging the less capable students behind.