Background information

The senior secondary English Language curriculum requires each student to study at least three elective modules. While the elective modules may be considered by some as add-ons to the curriculum with little relevance to improving students’ knowledge and skills learned in the Core Part, the teachers of Pui Shing Catholic Secondary School decided to take advantage of the unique nature of the different elective modules to enrich their students’ learning experiences.

After careful consideration of their students’ needs, the teachers identified two major development focuses in their students' first year of senior secondary – to develop their interest and motivation in reading and to enhance their confidence and skills in speaking.

As sufficient exposure to English outside class time and a positive attitude towards reading are essential to student learning, the teachers would like to help their students to develop interest and skills in reading. In order to achieve this goal, the teachers understood that their students needed help in the following areas:

• essential reading strategies and skills so that they could select appropriate reading materials for themselves and handle these materials independently,
• knowledge and skills in appreciating what they read, and
• developing an interest in reading outside class time

Another focus that the teachers had was to enhance their students’ confidence and skills in speaking as the assessment of their proficiency in speaking takes up 25% of the subject mark in the HKDSE English Language – 10% in the HKDSE speaking exam and 15% in SBA. In order to achieve this goal, the teachers did not only need to provide sufficient opportunities and incentive for their students to practise speaking both within and beyond school hours, but they also needed to develop their students’ abilities in generating ideas and expressing them. As at least one of the SBA tasks of the school would be on fiction or short stories, some knowledge in the features and how to appreciate such text types would be able to enhance the students’ performance and confidence in performing these tasks. Also, it was hoped that these knowledge and skills would be transferred to their students’ writing which in turn could help them to do better in their writing examinations.

With these students’ needs in mind and because of the motivational benefit and controlled length of short stories, the teachers decided to make use of the Learning English through Short Stories elective module to provide the context for their students to acquire the knowledge and skills identified. They also decided to integrate SBA-type tasks and mock assessments on a regular basis into the lessons, as recommended in the English Language: Teachers’ SBA Handbook (2010), to create an additional incentive for their students to read more extensively outside class time and practise their speaking skills both within and beyond class time.