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HK Makes Efforts to Raise Teachers' Professionalism
Hong Kong is making efforts to raise teachers' professionalism and students' language standards.
In a letter to all Hong Kong teachers on Wednesday, Joseph W P Wong, secretary for education and manpower of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), explained the rationale for the Government's language benchmarking initiative and sought their support to make the initiative a success.
Wong also explained in detail the background leading to the benchmarking initiative, addressed teachers' key concerns on the issue and set out the implementation arrangements for benchmarking the language proficiency of English and Putonghua teachers.
Noting that there are many factors which may influence the language proficiency of students, he said that language benchmarking was one of the key elements of the HKSAR government's comprehensive strategy in tackling the problem.
"There can be no doubt that teachers' language proficiency has a direct bearing on students' language proficiency because of teachers' unique position in the education process," he said.
"From the 2000-01 school year onward, new teachers teaching English or Putonghua will have to be benchmarked through examinations, mostly within one year after they have started teaching the relevant subjects," he said.
"However, for serving teachers, they will have five years until 2005, to attain the benchmarks and will have two options to do so, " he added.
Wong stressed that each serving teacher had total discretion to decide for himself or herself whether to take the examination route or the training route and could, if they chose the training option, decide for themselves which recognized training courses to attend.
"The government has set aside about 240 million HK dollars (30. 8 million U.S. dollars) in the next five years to ensure that all serving English and Putonghua teachers will have the opportunity to attend training courses if they so wish," Wong noted.
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