A NSS Workshop

Lately, one Kwun Tong secondary school has invited me to run a workshop on one of the electives in NSS curriculum - Social Issues. Actually I am very glad to share my humble experience with frontline teachers and panel chairs in the territories. Personally, I am more keen on exploring non-language arts electives rather than language arts counterparts since I think the former is more practical and useful for the less able students. In the professional development courses that I am teaching, I usually introduce 'Pop Culture ', 'Workplace English Communication', 'Sports Communication' and 'Social Issues' to teacher participants. However, this time, my audience is only limited to a panel of 17 teachers, so I need to tailor-make the contents of the workshop and should have a better communication with the panel chair to see what I am expected to deliver. Up to now, I have corresponded to the panel chair twice and understood what teachers wanted to learn in this workshop. I am looking forward to collaborating with the colleagues in this secondary school.

A University Title

Yesterday, the UGC announced that the HKIEd's application for a university title was rejected and the Review Group Report in the meantime was also released. In the document, two proposed ideas were recommended to the Institute. First, the notion of 'merger' is an alternative like NIE in Singapore and IOE in Britain. Second, the Institute should develop and become a multidisciplinary institution which attends to the wider needs of society such as offering various undergraduate and postgraduate programs other than education.

Through the intranet, the President sent us an e email that the option one was non-issue. Actually he would attempt to focus all his efforts and put all available resources to turn the Institute into a university more than teacher-training organization. I think his determination to fight for the university title is evident and unambiguous. No matter what statue we were given, academic, teaching and administrative staffs are all working hand in hand to excel ourselves. Perhaps, the most unhappy ones would be students. It is understandable they were disappointed because they also worked hard to fight for the title. And most colleagues actually told students to work hard and behave well if they want to 'own' this university title. Who knows? Maybe after three years or another three years... We may become a unique "university", specializing at both education and social science disciplines.

"I enjoyed Saturday class"

Yesterday, I taught the other round of NSS professional development course (PDC). Since 2007, I have been teaching this course for more than 12 cohorts, each of which consists of 4 sessions of 3 hours.

From my observation, participants who opted for Saturday class usually performed better in class and showed more willingness to learn the current curriculum and assessment trends. There are two major reasons to account for this phenomenon. In the first place, teachers feel more relaxed since there is no need to do substitution after they go back to school. Can't believe it. Second, it is obvious that they feel more refreshed on Saturdays.

I asked one of the participants, "Why did you choose Saturday instead of weekdays to attend this course?"

She then replied: "My principal doesn't allow me to take any courses during school days (from Monday to Friday), so I can only attend PDC or seminars on Saturdays."

Another participant also told me that she enjoyed attending courses on Saturdays because she didn't need to think about teaching . "I enjoy Saturday classes. I can better concentrate on Saturdays since teaching and marking occupy most of my time on weekdays."

Though these 28 participants may not represent all teachers in Hong Kong, I reckon most of them are eager and even fond of upgrading their professional knowledge. Actually some of them do not mind spending their personal time to take courses given that Saturday is not counted as a working day (but I am sure most principals may think oppositely)...

All in all, most teachers are conscientious and committed to their work and it is only the system that fails to support them and make them more professional than ever.

Spoken Language and Written Language

This afternoon, it's my colleague's turn to give a lecture on the differences between the features of spoken and written language. By all means, spoken form and written form of language are very different in terms of mode of delivery and uses in various contexts of communication. However, scholarly research on writing has long been developed; whereas spoken discourse has just been explored since the last four decades of the 20th century.

Sure, my colleague, An, is always good at giving lively and stimulating lectures on discourse analysis as it is one of her research and teaching areas. She quoted a very good example to illustrate why spoken and written discourse are so different by using an example of her students who used to ask her a very interesting question:

'Dr. He, in the tutorial, you had a very high opinion of my oral presentation, but why you found out so many problems in my draft version when I sent it to you for comments.'

Then, An explained to all students in the lecture theatre: 'Yes, it's always easy to present a paper or a drafted version of an assignment verbally since there is so much visual and audio support to help convey the message, so to speak, resulting in better and more productive delivery of the presentation. However, when it comes down to written discourse, the draft is "alone", without any contextual clues or paralinguistic features to make its meaning explicit and clear to its readers! That's why writing is far more cognitively demanding than speaking in terms of transmission of information.'

I particularly like this example as writing is much more demanding than speaking. Writers have to make sure every word and every idea he/she put down on paper is relevant and sensible to readers who only read the text instead of seeing or meeting the writers face-to-face. Every single idea must be understandable and interpretable to others who are far and remote from the writers in time and space. An then concluded by saying 'Speaking is a process which is constantly happening and writing is a product which existed physically.'