Hong Kong Secondary 1–3 | DSE English Jumpstart Program (3/3)

If the mindset does not change, nothing else will

This is part 3 of the Secondary 1–3 jumpstart. It is about the research, and about the blind spots in how Hong Kong still thinks about English.

A complete training plan still slides back into “book more lessons” if parents and students keep the old assumptions. A wrong idea does more damage than a missing technique.

Hong Kong English is not IELTS. Treating the language like a maths problem, and outsourcing progress to a classroom, has been contradicted by the data and by eight years of tracking.

“If English is weak, book a class”

The reflex is familiar. English is weak, so the child needs lessons. The first question is almost always “online or in person?”. That is English treated as maths: sit in the lesson and the skill appears.

1. Can lessons make a student remember the 6,000 to 15,000 words the DSE asks for?
2. Can lessons make a student write 700 to 1,200 words in 120 minutes?
3. Can lessons make a student read about 2,600 words of advanced prose in 90 minutes?
4. Can lessons make a student follow a long listening, read about ten documents, and write three practical texts in about 117 minutes?
5. Can lessons make a student hold a group discussion and an individual response, out loud, in real time?

No. Not online, and not in a classroom. A teacher cannot memorise, write, listen, speak, or read on the student’s behalf. Those are not skills a lesson confers.

The 2025 figures: more lessons have not lifted the pass rate

If class-and-drill worked, Chinese-medium students tutored since childhood, in schools that drill every day, would not still be missing Level 3 at this rate.

A note on supply: a Chinese-medium school already runs about one or two English lessons a day, at least 250 a year, with something like 12 to 18 specialist English teachers. Hours are not the scarce thing.

Eight years of tracking: lessons alone do very little

EHLA followed ordinary “teach and learn” patterns for eight years, with a large body of learning data. Students who kept a daily English immersion moved. Students who relied on lessons alone, online or face to face, barely moved. Progress came from the daily contact with English, not from the tuition.

More tuition is not better. The hours have to be left for learning and for absorption. The more urgent the parent, and the more they hunt for a shortcut, the harder the target becomes. The loop is familiar: want results fast, fill the day with lessons, leave no time outside class, nothing is digested, English stays where it was.

The question that matters is whether any time is left for the learning itself.

English is not produced by attending class

English is not maths. Without ordinary immersion, the number of lessons barely matters.

One mistake is to depend on being fed in class, and to neglect everything between lessons. Parents watch the classroom and miss the plan for listening, speaking, reading, and writing — which is more than 80% of what matters. The classroom is the assist. It is under 20%.

The other mistake is Hong Kong’s thin English environment, especially for listening and speaking; too little time with native-speaking teachers; and too much “English taught in Chinese” in primary and junior secondary. Without those pieces, lessons do not show.

Time with a native-speaking teacher is a requirement, not an extra

Students in Hong Kong do not fall into natural English. Conversation with a native-speaking teacher is how they get used to the speed, start thinking and phrasing in English, meet real communication, learn to guess when they miss something, and build the habit of answering in the moment.

The earlier and the more often, the better. If primary school never did this, junior secondary students freeze because they are afraid of not understanding. By senior secondary the pressure is higher and the time is gone. The habit is very hard to start then.

Cases across Hong Kong show the same pattern. Long years of Chinese-medium coaching mostly produce students who are surviving in English, not students who are good at it. EHLA does support students who cannot yet follow a native-speaking teacher. The support is there to get them into the immersion, not to justify staying in Chinese forever.

Why primary and junior secondary have to get used to English-medium teaching

Two facts do not go away. EMI schools teach in English, and students coming from Chinese-medium primary schools often struggle at the start. Parents who plan ahead put their children with native-speaking teachers early: the pace, the speed, a basic habit of thinking in English, and enough language to discuss a real topic.

Most degrees at Hong Kong universities are taught, read, and examined in English. Students who learned their subjects in Chinese often hit a wall. Avoiding native-speaking classrooms does not make university easier. It postpones the problem until the stakes are higher.

English is a language, not maths. It is learned by living in it. A child who cannot yet follow, and still stays in the conversation, is further ahead than a child who never leaves Chinese. One sentence understood, one sentence said, is the start. If the mindset does not change, nothing else will.

Who wrote this: EHLA

Rooted in Oxford.

EHLA studies what actually changes English learning, then turns that research into programmes schools and students can run. We work with individual learners and with mainstream Hong Kong schools. More than 300 schools have taken part in EHLA pilot programmes.

“My colleagues at the University of Oxford and I met EHLA in Oxford, and I was completely fascinated by what EHLA is doing…” — Prof. Furlong, former Dean of the Department of Education, University of Oxford