Introducing authentic, sustained but scaffolded exposure to spoken English in HK's primary schools

Abstract

This paper describes an attempt to change the way young Hong Kong children are introduced to English. We challenge EFL orthodoxy by exposing young learners to language they will struggle to understand, as happens to all children with their mother tongue. We describe a strategy being piloted in a single primary school in Hong Kong, where children are exposed to authentic (albeit fictional) communication via a children’s soap series: Grange Hill. Our approach provides school-centred settings and plots children can relate to the world over, frequent repetition of common communicative functions, a developing identification with school-based situations and peer age-group personalities, non-face threatening yet engaging activities pre- and post-viewing, and all by means of a commercially-tested ‘soap’ series that has passed the ‘reality’ test of holding children's attention - not just as a learning device, and not dumbed down for language learners. Series like Grange Hill in their raw state offer a 'descriptive' - naturalistic and non-structured - exposure to the target language. Our aim is to scaffold children’s exposure to these programmes, and to integrate them in a curriculum that corresponds more to the Language Arts than to the traditional English curriculum. We discuss the reception of this approach by the children in this primary school, and some of the main obstacles and constraints to this kind of initiative in the HK cultural and school context.