A recurring theme in the Hong Kong community is that language standards are "falling", particularly for English, but also for Chinese.

I have great empathy for our language educators, as almost daily there is commentary, informal and anecdotal, or selective use, even misuse, of emerging data, which paints a depressing view about our so called "falling English standards".  Any "evidence" to the contrary is given less prominence or disbelieved.

Evidence points to rising standards

Despite this prevailing wisdom, there is no evidence English standards have fallen; indeed there is more evidence suggesting they have risen modestly over the past decade.

Test results across key stages of education indicate the following:

* the average Hong Kong Attainment Test (HKAT) scores for English at Pre-S1 level (P6 students as they enter S1) have risen each year from 2001 to 2004;

* at HKCEE, in English Syllabus B, the percentage of students achieving a C or above (benchmarked to an "O" level pass) has risen from 8.6% in 1997 to 11.4% in 2004 (In this examination the proportion of school students achieving E or above has risen from 59.2% in 1997 to 70.2% in 2004.); and

* while we have no trend data as yet, our university graduates have taken in large numbers, in the past two years, the International English Language Testing System (IELTs) and the great majority have been assessed at Level 6 (Competent Users) and above.

I would prefer to believe this evidence than any number of anecdotes, no matter the status of the people delivering them.

Community aspirations rising quickly

Why then does the "falling standards" paradigm hold such sway? This is not just a Hong Kong phenomenon. However the place of English here has a particular cultural, economic and social importance which magnifies the intensity of the debate.

The underlying problem is that, no matter what the current or past language standards, community needs and expectations have far outstripped any improvement we can sustain. 

The rapid restructuring of Hong Kong, its rich culture and global inter-connectedness, place greater premium on higher literacy standards than our education enterprise is able to meet. Development of higher levels of trilingualism and biliteracy are aspirational goals for the whole of the Hong Kong community.

Knowing more about language learning

So our focus must be on improvement. We now know more about language development through better, richer data which is increasingly available.

"In the dark all education systems, all schools, all classrooms look similar... but with some good data... important differences become apparent." - PISA 2004

I want to discuss three data sets; Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Territory System Assessment (TSA) 2004 of Primary 3 students and Program for International Reading Literacy Survey (PIRLS) 2004 of Primary 4 students. Taken together they can give confidence to our language teachers, but also show what we can do to improve the standards of language learning of our young people.

Hong Kong in leading group for maths, science

PISA shows our 15 years old students are among the best learners in the world. In mathematics and science, Hong Kong is in the small group of leading jurisdictions. In reading results for the mother tongue, our results were painted, again, as evidence of falling standards, since we fell from 6th to10th in the two PISA administrations (2000-2003).

A closer examination shows that only four countries were statistically ahead of us and that Hong Kong was among a second group of nations (14 in fact) where statistical difference is not significant. Moreover Hong Kong succeeds not only in overall quality, but also in terms of equity since the difference between our high achieving and low achieving students is relatively narrower than most other countries.

This does not mean we can be complacent, since reading literacy is not at the levels of mathematics and science. However clearly our performance must be deemed acceptable at the very least.

75% of young learners grasp English with no special support

HKEAA recently completed the first administration of the TSA of Primary 3 students to assess their performance against professionally defined competences in Chinese, English and mathematics. Again the headline was "25% of P3 students fail English".

The results showed us that 75% of our young learners are able to proceed to the next key stage of learning in English language (83% in Chinese), without special support. The remaining 25% have not failed, but have been assessed as needing specific support if they are not to have their progress seriously compromised. Empirical studies show that if these students cannot be urgently assisted then the gap will widen in the next key stage of learning.

These results are point-in-time, do not tell us whether we have improved or not, and can only complement the knowledge teachers will have about their own students. We will assess our P6 students in July 2005 and S3 students in 2006. We will progressively build a picture of performance of our students over time.

While the Hong Kong community will know more about the standards of our students, the major impact of these assessments will be as feedback to teachers and schools on the strengths and weaknesses of their students and as signals for improvement strategies. 

Teachers learn from students' mistakes

There is international evidence that shows as teachers become more familiar with the expected standards, there will be corresponding improved performance of students.

The underlying problem is that, no matter what the current or past language standards, community needs and expectations have far outstripped any improvement we can sustain.  The rapid restructuring of Hong Kong, its rich culture and global inter-connectedness, place greater premium on higher literacy standards than our education enterprise is able to meet.

Development of higher levels of trilingualism and biliteracy are aspirational goals for the whole of the Hong Kong community.

The third data set is the PIRLS, an international study undertaken for Hong Kong by Dr SK TSE and his team at the University of Hong Kong.

Top students biliterate, 'excellent'

It studies biliteracy of P4 students and is particularly informative as it attempts to measure factors which may influence reading outcomes.

Key findings show that our top students are biliterate and by international standards are excellent, literacy in Chinese improved from 2001 to 2004, girls do better than boys and that literacy is higher in Chinese than for English.

These findings echo the various data presented above.

It was also found that parents give importance of learning to Chinese more than they do for English. We could have an otherwise mistaken impression.

Reading habits and student self concept of students in Chinese is as high as in other countries, but not so for English.

Room for teachers to enhance English language teaching

PIRLS studied teachers' strategies. Most educators accept that reading is supported when children are encouraged to identify the main ideas in a text/story, explain/support their understanding, compare what they have read with their own experience, and with other reading, make predictions, make generalisations and draw inferences and to describe the style and structure of the text.

PIRLS has found that we still have very mixed effort around these strategies in our classrooms. But, more significantly, these strategies are less well developed in English than in Chinese classrooms. There is clearly room for teachers to widen systematically their repertoire to enhance language learning and for pedagogy transfer from Chinese to English lessons.

Using data for improvement

I have only skimmed across the surface of these data sets. I encourage all language educators to spend some time in looking at the data in more depth.

We will continue to face disquiet when we use data in educational discussion. Charges are made that data can be statistically moribund, educationally unsound, even morally reprehensible. There is some truth in all of these.

Data will continue to be misused and misrepresented. But that does not mean we abandon it. Our task is to ensure we have protocols for the use of data, that we encourage contextualisation and that it be focussed on driving for improvement.

"Without data, I am just another person with an opinion."

Language teachers have a profound and very important role to play in the future of Hong Kong. They should be able to enhance their professionalism and go about their daily teaching without the inevitable burden and undermining of confidence brought about by uninformed speculation about the language standards of our young people in Hong Kong.

Deputy Secretary for Education & Manpower Chris Wardlaw penned this "Insider's Perspective" column, which appears on the Education & Manpower Bureau's website.