Background information

With the introduction of SBA, teachers are very much concerned with the following:

1. How can we help students to read more so that reading can be enjoyable and pleasurable?
2. How can we enhance our students’ oral performance?

Teachers generally find that teaching speaking is more challenging than reading, because of the growing importance of speaking skills in the public examination and SBA. For teachers, it is important to improve students’ presentation and discussion skills. However, for students, discussion is more demanding than presentation because they need to learn how to start a conversation, take turns, respond to others’ ideas, ask for clarification, and make conclusions etc. Even for bright students, it is not easy to perform well in discussions. In order to equip students with better discussion skills, teachers were willing to try out new ideas.