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Over the past two years, I have taught English to more than 20 Hong Kong adults. I would like to highlight some of the common problems that my students have encountered. Pronunciation has proved to be one of the areas that can be particularly difficult for Hong Kong learners. The single consonants “r”, “v” and “z” as well as blended consonants “ch” and “sh” are particularly hard to pronounce, since there are no equivalent in their mother tongue Cantonese language. 3x3 drilling is helpful only after students can hear the difference, for example, between blended consonant “sh” and consonant “s”. To help students distinguish the differences among different single and blended consonants, teachers sometimes have to demonstrate how the tongues and lips move exactly. When the students finally grasp the differences, teachers can use 3x3 drilling on a list of words containing those consonants to drill their pronunciation. It is always helpful to break down each word into individual vowel and consonant sounds; for example, the word “wash” contains the consonant sound “w”, vowel sound short “a” and blended ending consonant “sh”. This would help students grasp the pronunciation more quickly. In terms of grammar, Hong Kong learners tend to have trouble with articles, since articles don’t exist in the Cantonese language. Even intermediate learners may sometimes forget to include an article before a singular countable noun. The article “the” can also be problematic since there are so many rules to remember as to when the article “the” is needed before proper nouns. Adult beginners also tend to have problems with auxiliary verbs “be” and “do” due to their inability to recognize the part of speech of words in a sentence. It is particularly problematic if a student tries to guess the part of speech of a word based on its Cantonese translation, because a word can be one part of speech in Cantonese but another in English. An example is the word “late”, which is often mistaken by Hong Kong learners as a verb while it is an adjective. As a result of not being able to recognize the part of speech of a word, some students may make wrong sentences such as “I late” or “Do I late?”. Speaking of parts of speech, sometimes Hong Kong students also have trouble realizing that a word can be a noun or a verb depending on how you use it. An example is the word “run”. If I say, “Let’s run”, “run” is a verb; but if I say, “Let’s go out for a run”, “run” in this sentence is a noun. Students who do not understand parts of speech are prone to making grammatically wrong sentences. Prepositions is another tough learning point for Hong Kong learners, as is the case for learners in other countries. Since there are no prepositions in the Cantonese language, it is easy for Hong Kong learners to miss out prepositions or use the wrong propositions in their sentences. Besides, adjectives ending with “ing” and “ed” can also be confusing to Hong Kong learners, since the pronunciation of these pairs of adjectives are similar (only the ending sounds are different) and they have always assumed that the words can be used in the same way.
