Learning Language Through Literature in Secondary Schools: A Resource Book for Teachers of English

Chapter 4 - Using Hong Kong Stories in Hong Kong Classrooms

Ll CI----IAPTER ..L Using Hong Kong Stories in Hong Kong Classrooms Peter Kennedy ... classic English poetry was a kind of force-feeding. It did not delight us by reflecting our experience.l WHY USE HONG KONG WRITING IN ENGLISH CLASSES? In the lines above, poet Seamus Heaney recalls his boyhood experience of reading English literature in Ireland. The texts he encountered in school said nothing to him about his Irish experience. He records how he went on to discover poems which did deal with the (rural, Irish) world he knew. He learnt, to his delight, that his own experience was a fit subject for poetry. Heaney grew up in an English-speaking community. For many Hong Kong secondary school students, the events, values, settings, people, names and historical references in English literature can seem even more culturally remote than they were for Heaney. When Shakespeare wrote'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?', it was intended to be a compliment. It certainly wouldn't be in humid Hong Kong! Literary texts have an important role to play in helping to make secondlanguage learning more meaningful and memorable.However, the texts students encounter in Hong Kong secondary schools should be situated within their own cultural experience. Brock (1990) makes out a case for 'localized literature' in Hong Kong and 46 Peter Kennedy --====================== Macao second-language classrooms. He contends that such texts promote successful reading comprehension because they , ... offer a balance between the reader's background knowledge and that presupposed by the text . . . [which helps prevent] many of the difficulties a reader encounters when faced with culturally foreign texts.'2 Unfamiliar cultural content may impede students' learning of linguistic information. Post and Rathet (1996) cite a body ofrecent research on reading and ask, 'Why overburden our students with both new linguistic content and new cultural information simultaneously?,3 Reading is an interactive process in which the reader seeks to make sense of a text by matching it against hislher real world knowledge. Using Hong Kong texts in English, on topics consonant with the experiences of Hong Kong students, and using tasks that will enable learners to deploy their prior knowledge and experiences should assist in the interpretation process. Hong Kong writing in English can act as a 'cultural bridge' to other English texts. WHICH HONG KONG WRITERS? Using Hong Kong writing in the English class can enable students to draw on their own background knowledge. If the topics, beliefs, ideas and metaphors are culturally familiar and only the language new, the texts may well be more accessible and motivating. This does not mean using texts that make superficial references to the Star Ferry or which tell a cliched tale of tai tais, taipans and triads. Many attempts have been made to tell The Hong Kong Story (particularly by outsiders in 1997). Much more interesting (and relevant for Hong Kong students) are the many and various Hong Kong stories told by local writers.4 Such Hong Kong writing could include short stories by Peng Cao (Fung Suk-yin),Ni Kuang, Liu Yichang, Xi Xi (Zhang Yan), David Wong and Eileen Chang;5 poems by P.K. Leung, Fan Sin-piu, Laurence Wong and Louise Ho;6 plays by Anthony Chan, Raymond To, Joanna Chan and Danny Yung.7 Some of these Hong Kong writers choose to write in English - Louise Ho and David Wong, for instance - others are translated from Chinese. It may be objected that literature written in Chinese is best read in the original language. In one sense, this is undeniable. What we are talking about here though is harnessing the power ofsuch texts for the second-language classroom. Of course, in selecting texts , proper account must be taken of the lexis and syntax appropriate for the level of the learner. However, writing which says something worthwhile and, at the same time, reflects a world students can identify with has an important role to play in post-colonial English-language learning in Hong Kong.s I would like to look at a short story, Wrong Number, by one of Hong Kong's most distinguished writers, Liu Yichang.9 The central idea of the story is an engagingly simple one. We have two versions that are almost identical, except =========- Using Hong Kong Stories in Hong Kong Classrooms 47 that in the first, a young man is knocked down by a bus, while in the second, he is...