Teaching TEFL in Hong Kong is an Uphill Struggle
by John Hammond
THE DRILLING OF the cicadas and the drilling of Hong Kong’s construction sites all blend into one outside the classroom, muffled only by the din of the air-conditioning and the swish of the ceiling fans that the students like to have on full blast. The sight of the day’s worksheets flying all over the classroom provides a useful source of entertainment amidst the tedium of the Hong Kong education system. All these sounds, of course, are drowned by the din of a class impatient for the end of the lesson.
Outside the window is a solid concrete wall of public housing tenements, drab green and grey mosaic tiles around barred windows, the contents of each room half hidden by a variety of curtains, and washing hanging out to dry on lines hung from the bars, dripping on unsuspecting passers-by many floors below. Only on one side of the estate school where I work can I see anything comfortingly natural, but on that side of the school I could easily imagine myself to be in the middle of a jungle–a thick tangle of trees climbing the steep hillside into the low hanging mist that drifts across the mountain-tops–forest that looks as if it has never been penetrated by any humans, let alone any of the people who live on its very edge. Air-conditioned shopping malls are the playground of bored teenagers, not tropical rainforest. This is definitely the side of the school that I prefer.
Thus is the view from a secondary school in Hong Kong’s New Territories. I have plenty of time for all this looking out of the window during the frequent tests that the students have to undergo. Hong Kong revels in tests. The blackboards in every classroom proclaim them daily: class tests, end-of-unit tests, impromptu tests, short tests, uniform tests, term-end tests. Every day there’s some kind of test, and they are all greeted by the students with the same bored resignation. I doubt if the reception would be any more positive in a better school, but my school is what used to be called a Band 5 school. It is now officially Band 3, but as there are now only three bandings it is still at the bottom of the Hong Kong streaming system.
Things used to be different, so I’m told. But the school has been in the bottom banding now for a good few years, and seems quite accustomed to its position. The teachers are comfortable with the lack of pressure for results and the easy pace of the curriculum, and they also accept quite happily that the majority of students can’t wait to leave the school at the end of every day instead of staying behind for one of the many club activities that other schools are so busy with. The students, merely by attending such a school, are accepting the fact that they are at the bottom of the pile, and have few prospects of breaking free.
All this would not be so bad if the school was able to provide a level and pace of education that suited the students. That, however, would interrupt the precious uniformity of the Hong Kong education system. This dictates that all students in all schools should follow the same syllabus at the same speed, resulting in the same assessment, which ultimately brings them to the Hong Kong Certificate of Education.
This principle is so self-evident in Hong Kong, with both staff and policy-makers, that it doesn’t really bear discussion. I used to bring it up at English department meetings in my early days in government schools. I used to mention, for example, that there were several students in each of my classes who neither spoke nor understood a word of English as they had only recently arrived from mainland China and had had no formal English education at all. Not only were they expected to follow the same course as all the others who had enjoyed English lessons all through primary school (though had not necessarily benefited from them), but they were not given any supplementary tutoring to at least attempt to bring them up to the level of their classmates. Such a departure from the principle of uniformity was out of the question, it seemed.
This was when I was teaching at a newly established school whose staff were eager to attain the top banding as soon as possible, by improving the level of their intake. In the first year they had no choice over what students the Education Department allocated to them (a mysterious process that has never been fully explained to me), but it was clear that the low ability students they were forced to take in their first year would be sacrificed on the altar of the school’s future good reputation.
They were ignored, at least in their English lessons, while the school did whatever it could to impress the Education Department in order to receive a higher level of intake the following year. Soon those students will leave for a lower banded school like my current employer, unwilling to listen to another word of English and incapable of understanding it anyway. That school is now officially Band 1 (the sacrifice was evidently worthwhile).
Similar students end up in my classes now, the energy and enthusiasm of a few years ago jaded, their eyes glazed, and their enjoyment of English killed stone dead. They have failed every English test they have ever taken, and have been convinced by the system, and even by some teachers, that they are failures, beyond hope. Now they are at the bottom of the pile.
Needless to say, the din they make that is enough to drown out all the other sounds of Hong Kong is not usually eager pairwork or a hail of interested questions on grammar or pronunciation. I’m not surprised they look forward to the end of the day with such relish. The lures of the shopping malls beckon.
These days, I don’t make a fuss about it anymore. The job description of a “Native English Teacher” as advisor and instigator of change has about as much meaning as the grand terms in any mission statement or corporate vision. We are supposed to “inspire,” to “motivate,” to create a “living English environment,” but like Hong Kong students and teachers we are not supposed to question.
Teaching such unmotivated students is a proverbial brick wall I find hard enough, and I no longer seek to bang my head against another one in staff meetings. I do my best, and there are countless other teachers in Hong Kong who also do their best, but we are all constrained by the mighty immovability of the education system. Like the tenement walls, it’s drab and in need of renovation, and like the jungle, it’s thick and tangled and hopelessly overgrown.
