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About US
Thirteen years in Hong Kong classrooms taught me one clear lesson: reading and listening cannot be crammed.
I spent over a decade teaching English in Hong Kong secondary schools - qualifying via CUHK (PGDE, TESOL), and spending my final six years as an EDB NET. Most of my time was spent with junior forms: the crucial years where core reading and listening skills are quietly built or permanently missed.
The gap I kept seeing
Across every one of those schools, the same thing went unfixed. Reading and listening are slow skills. They do not reward a three week cram, so they get pushed aside for the parts of the syllabus that do. The advice students get instead is to read more books and listen to podcasts, which is not teaching, and for a Hong Kong teenager with a full timetable it is not realistic either.
It was rarely one dramatic case. It was the same student in every school: hard working, doing the reading, sitting through the lessons, and still losing marks in Part B because nobody had shown them how to listen and take notes at the same time. They were told to practise more. Practising more of the wrong thing is how a student ends up convinced they are simply bad at English.
What I taught instead
Self paced listening. Predicting before you hear. Real note taking, the kind an examiner rewards. Reading pitched at the level a student is actually at, rather than the level the textbook assumes. The students who did those things daily pulled ahead, and the habit did more for them than any revision weekend.
What we built
Cadence English is that practice, made daily and made portable. Short reading and listening papers in real HKDSE format, about ten minutes each, with an answer key and a one line Skill Tip in English and Chinese on every question. Lessons are in English. The skills cycle and return harder, so a student who keeps showing up keeps moving.
Who it is for
Hong Kong secondary students working towards the HKDSE, and parents who would rather fund a habit than a panic. Students start with a free taster and move onto daily practice when they are ready.
Where we are
Hong Kong trained, now working from London. Cadence English Ltd is registered in the United Kingdom, and every paper is written against the current HKDSE Paper 3 format.
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