Cultivating an interest in learning

Costumes and games in class

Shawn Lyons, a native English teacher from the U.S., says student participation makes lessons more fun. (Courtesy of Shawn Lyons)

By Karen Tong

Learning English can be fun. Stu-dents commonly lack an interest in language learning, so educa-tors are changing their teaching methods to engage their interests.

The Hong Kong Institute of Education is training potential teachers to design interactive and fun teaching materials.

Joy Lam, a Year 2 language education student at the institute, said, “We are learning language arts.”

Language arts connect language learning with other fields in music and visual arts.

In a project, Ms. Lam and her group members designed a package to teach a poem about dinosaurs.

First, they would ask students to watch the movie Jurassic Park to get an image of dinosaurs and to listen to native English.

Students would then play a computer game, followed by a composition assignment on these ancient animals.

If this proposal could be carried out in real life, classroom learning would be much more interesting, said Ms. Lam.

Apart from training potential teachers, the government introduced the Native English-speaking Teachers Scheme in 1998.

Now, more than 800 teachers under this scheme are teaching English in primary and secondary schools.

Shawn Lyons of San Francisco is one of them.

He teaches in Mrs.Wu York Yu Memorial College, where he has to follow a tight teaching scheme and meet examination schedules.

Still, he tries to make his lessons as interesting as possible.

To teach about Halloween, Mr. Lyons showed up in class in a vampire costume. He showed students a video about how San Francisco people celebrate the holiday.

Students did not just sit and watch. They participated by “bobbing” for apples, a traditional activity around Halloween in which participants use only their mouths to get an apple out of a bucket of water.

Lessons are sometimes too short for these activities, so Mr. Lyons meets students at lunchtime or after school for more activities.

The reason for the scheme is not that local teacher quality is low.

In fact, Mr. Lyons said that Hong Kong teachers are good.

The scheme serves as an additional resource to provide information on English-speaking culture and an environment to speak English outside the class.

Mr. Lyons said they face difficulties while trying to make classroom learning enjoyable.

A tight syllabus is one. Student passivity is another.

Mr. Lyons seldom has to call on students in America, but in Hong Kong, he has to do this sometimes to make sure people speak up.

“Besides a few active learners, most of the class just sits there and keeps quiet,” said he.

Learning can be fun only when students participate, he said.


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