Letters | Why it’s time to let native English teachers go

Readers discuss the second-language learning needs of students, and the benefits of Hong Kong’s first breast milk bank

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Confucian Tai Shing Primary School pupils in Wong Tai Sin wear Confucian robes at a ceremony for new students on September 2. Photo: Eugene Lee

Published: 11:30am, 13 Jan 2025

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The letter, “Hong Kong should not ‘localise’ native English teachers” (December 24), argued that teachers hired under the Native-speaking English Teacher (NET) Scheme should not be required to deliver regular English lessons, but “should remain as English-learning enhancers with flexible duties”. Back in 2010, another letter, “Management a serious problem in our schools”, said teachers under the scheme “get marginalised by the system”. Both letters seem to make one common point – the extra value NETs add is peripheral.

According to the Education Bureau, the scheme was introduced into public-sector secondary schools in the 1998-99 academic year and into primary schools in 2002-03 to “enhance the teaching of English Language and increase exposure of students to English”.

NETs, to a great extent, fail to achieve the two goals. In terms of teaching, they hardly know what most local students need owing to their deficient experience in second language acquisition. Their inefficient teaching in Hong Kong is probably due to the fact that Chinese and English are very different.

Chinese is a monosyllabic language: each word is of one syllable. Additionally, it is a tonal language: the meaning of a word changes when the tone is different.

English is polysyllabic and strikingly different. In English, meaning can be changed by stressing one syllable instead of another. Take “produce” as an example. When the stress is on the second syllable, it means “make”. When the stress is on the first, it means “something grown through farming”. Furthermore, Chinese has no inflection while English is heavily dependent on inflection to exhibit grammatical features such as number or tense.

When it comes to increasing students’ exposure to English, a NET’s contribution is only a drop in the ocean. For example, there can be about 800 students in a school but only one NET. How is an English-speaking environment to be created? In a class of about 35 students, it is highly improbable that every student will communicate with their NET.