Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1980

bilingual in a sense that I can ask for the bill in Cantonese in the restaurant, that is about all. A m I bilingual? Well, I am, when I go to the restaurant and need the bill, but when I need to express more than that in Cantonese, then obviously I am monolingual English. Again I am in a sense bilingual French in that I can read French adequately for m y need, I can read journals and so on in French. But, I have been in Paris sometime ago and the quality of m y spoken French would certainly brand m e not as bilingual. As far as reading is concerned, I a m bilingual, but where speaking and listening is concerned, I am not. Would you then say because you are not bilingual in speaking and listening, therefore you are not bilingual? It hinges upon what you need in the language. I think that we can help the University to define what it means to be bilingual. This will give us a better understanding of what we need when we say The Chinese University has a policy of bilingualism. Q. H o w much communication exchange in English do you think is required of the Chinese people in Hong Kong? A. Our graduates will go out to work in a specific sector of society. Although they may be required to interact with people within a certain discipline in English, when they go home, it is not likely that they will have to be bilingual, not to their wives, or their children, or their friends and so on. Hong Kong, after all, is basically a monolingual society. The amount of communication exchange in English that is required of Chinese people is only a small proportion of their everyday communication needs, and where there is a need, it is almost exclusively in terms of their profession. It is very nice for us to say that everyone should be able to communicate with foreigners, but that is not a very strong need for the more than 90% of the population of Hong Kong who are speakers of Chinese, and therefore does not have a very high priority in terms of their needs. What does have high priority, from the University's point of view and from the poin t of view of the career prospects of our students, is the need to be bilingual in their professional field. Q. What is the most effective wa y to achieve proficiency in the general use of English? A. W e believe, as teachers of English as a second or foreign language, that if we can give students a facility for using English within their profession, this is going to have an impact on other areas of their communication skills. The most effective way of developing a "general" use of English is to first of all get a high degree of proficiency in the area where you feel the need most. M y wife is working on her Cantonese in terms of the needs of being in the market, so she is learning prices and the names of things. This is a wedg e into a general proficiency in Cantonese. If you want to really get someone to learn a language, strike at the area where the need is greatest. W e strike at the needs of our students in their studies, and of our graduates in their professional work. There will inevitably be an impact on their "general" use of English. Q. What are the major problems of teaching of English as a second language (TESL)? A. If I were to answer you twenty years ago, I would be absolutely certain. If you were to ask m e what are the problems of Chinese people learning English twenty years ago, I would say I know exactly. I would express m y answer in terms of the code: they do not put ‘s, on the end of the plurals; they do not put ‘-ing’ on the end of verbs; they leave out and ‘the',etc.I could describe all those problems. W e have now become convinced that this is not the most important problem of learning English as a second or foreign language, but that there are many problems other than the code. Problems initially of communicating a message using the appropriate conventions, whether or not the code is used accurately, are extremely important. W e can define problems in terms of what mistakes Chinese people are going to be making when they learn English. It used to be very popular in our discipline of TES L to say that we have got to teach these problems, which, however, disappear in mysterious ways rather tha n through direct instruction: they disappear as a person becomes muc h more exposed to and therefore much more fluent in the use of English. W e have in the past tended to teach the code and to emphasize the English language itself rather than teach the way of English being spoken and let the forms gradually improve themselves as we become more used to hearing an d using the language. So, the problem in teaching English as 24