Reflection

education

Reflection

I started to learn English when I was a P.3 student. Since there are many differences between Shanghai and Hong Kong ELT curriculum framework in terms of teaching and learning approaches, contents of textbook and learning materials, I will reflect my own experience as a primary student.

According to my learning experience, the primary ELT curriculum concentrated on teaching students to acquire subject knowledge in certain contexts and give appropriate expressions for communication. During my P.3 and P.4 stages, the teaching and learning approaches are mainly based on audio-lingual. In detail, listening and speaking are the basis of primary language learning. In the classroom, we were always asked to read aloud after the English teacher or the tape recorder. This behaviorist approach was adapted to help us respond automatically and memorize patterns.

I believe that the audio-lingual method can successfully lead a direct result of the need for my English proficiency especially in listening and speaking because repetition and drilling leave impression on students. Also, it made me feel more confident when being exposed in the English medium or facing problems after accomplishing enough drills. However, I consider that the audio-lingual approach places emphasis on repetition and accuracy, which considerably makes my learning process boring and inflexible. For example, I still remember that my P.3 English lessons were organized by grammatical structure and practicing short dialogs. The dialogs comprise daily conversations like follows:

“Hello, Linda!”

“Hello, Peter!”

“How are you?”

“I’m fine, thank you. And you?”

“Very well, thanks!”

In the classroom, I listened to recordings of conversations, read repeatedly and sometimes applied role-playing. It is obvious that this teaching and learning approach demands more memorization of structured dialogs and focuses on the accuracy of pronunciation or other...