Call for new blood as teachers flop in English test
An educator on Wednesday said it was shocking that more than half of the 1,500 teachers who sat an English proficiency exam failed the written paper, while a third failed the oral test. Speaking on RTHK's Hong Kong Today programme, Mervyn Cheung, chairman of the Hong Kong Education Policy Concern Organisation, said the failure rate showed the need to bring in new recruits at schools.  "As we all know, the past few years have seen relatively large wastage in the force of English teachers in our schools," he told RTHK's Ben Tse. "We need professionally qualified new blood for English language teaching in schools, who have high competence in teaching and improving students' writing skills, which are important for the [Diploma of Secondary Education] examinations and also recruitment tests conducted by, say, the government and other established employing organisations." The failure rate for the written section of the Language Proficiency Assessment for Teachers, organised by the Education Bureau and the Examinations and Assessment Authority, reached 54 percent this year, up nine percentage points on last year. Cheung said the written paper was a crucial component of the English test, and the results could not be regarded as satisfactory. He said he felt that one problem was that students who had achieved a university place by passing the DSE exams would concentrate on their major and minor subjects rather than their English language skills. "This kind of mentality won't do the students any good for improving their language skills," Cheung added. "They can only improve their language competence by having more systematic training and course attendance focusing on English language learning and improvement."