04/11/2015
Challenges young adults learning English face in Hong Kong. 2015-11-04
When students are asked to identify the parts of speech, some secondary students really do not have a clue to what that truly means. They are told to memorise the spellings and the sounds of words, but not really to understand how to use them logically. Some of them do not even know what are, proper nouns, and common nouns, singular and plural, countable and uncountable nouns, all of which are the basic concepts of learning English.
Common nouns are words for people, or things, or animals, or ideas. For example, he / she is an ‘architect’, that is my ‘computer’, that ‘leopard’ is big. Proper nouns are special names given to people, places and things including ‘months’, ‘days of the week’, ‘festivals’ and ‘countries’ and their ‘capital cities’. They always begin with a capital letter. For example, ‘Professor Black’, ‘April’, ‘Monday’, ‘Father’s / Mother’s Day’, ‘Germany’ and ‘Berlin’.
The famous landmarks of countries as well as the people who live in a country are also proper nouns such as ‘Big Ben’ (London, England), the ‘Sphinx’ (Egypt, Gizeh), the ‘Swiss’ (people from Switzerland), and ‘Canadians’ (people from Canada).
English is a complexed language to learn and students in Hong Kong have the opportunity to learn it from a very young age. Educators have the privilege to share their knowledge with the students and help them develop a positive attitude towards learning and growing, but unfortunately, there are no external environments outside the classroom that encourages the students to practice their English, for example, ‘London Town’, ‘Washington Town’ etc.
By Martin