Read more, listen more? Why the usual DSE advice doesn't work

中文摘要

同學想提升英語閱讀和聆聽能力時，往往只會得到「睇多啲同聽多啲」的建議，然而這些建議大多未能配合他們的英語水平，也不切合文憑試所需的技巧。

在閱讀、聆聽、寫作和說話四項技能之中，閱讀和聆聽最需要長時間練習才見進步，正因如此，大多數同學、學校和補習社都把有限的時間集中在寫作和說話上。

英韻的閱讀和聆聽課程每天十分鐘，設有三個程度，清楚標示每天練習的技巧，並即時自動批改，讓同學馬上明白錯在哪裏，以及正確答案背後的原因。

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Do more and you'll get better?

How did you get better at reading or listening? I bet for most of us the answer is to do more. Just like many skills in life, the more we practise, the better we become. Does that same logic apply to learning a language?

From my many years of teaching in the Hong Kong secondary school English classroom, one thing remained constant: the big gap in English level among the students I've taught. I would often have a few students who were fluent in English, while also having a few who had next to zero English.

When I talked to the fluent students about what they did when they were younger to build the foundation they have now, the answer was always: "I have been using English since I was young." Some did it through reading novels, comic books and online articles, and some through watching YouTube and movies. The common thing was using English throughout the years. The students who are weaker in English normally do the opposite: they avoid all possible situations where they need to use English, even among classmates.

The weaker students would sometimes ask the stronger ones for study tips, and most of the time all they could say was, "You should read more and listen to more English." That is the same advice most teachers would give. But if it were that simple, most of our students would be great in English.

Research suggests that to read on your own, you need to know about 98 out of every 100 words. With a teacher or the right materials guiding you, you can learn from harder texts, but "read more" usually means reading on your own. If you're 16 or 17 but your English level is really elementary, the right reading level for you on your own might be primary school. So when you ask them to read more, like a book from the library, how discouraging would it be to find out which book is right for them? Listening might be worse. Where can we even find listening materials at different levels? Music and TV shows are all good, but how effective are they when you're reading the lyrics and the subtitles?

The problem we all face is the lack of the right materials at the right level.

Why reading and listening get left behind

So if the advice has always been to read more and listen more, how do we, as teachers, teach these skills in class? Don't be surprised: mostly by doing more reading exercises and more listening exercises. That's not for lack of effort. With full classes, a syllabus to finish and marking piling up, there is rarely time to write materials for every level, so we've relied on the publishers and their materials, because making learning materials was their job.

Writing and speaking are different. It is much, much easier to teach them and see an immediate effect. With writing, once you've written your essay, the teacher can mark it, correct you and show you what you could have done better. You learn from the corrections, hopefully remember them, and use them next time. Speaking is similar: the teacher can tell you where you could have given a different point of view, or even how to pronounce a certain word. And if the topic or text type comes up again, you can follow the same structure, reuse the same sentence patterns, even reuse the same vocabulary.

With reading and listening, we can go through the answers and show you where they were. But next time, it depends on the material, and whether it asks the same type of question or tests the same skill. There are many more things that change.

So it is natural for schools to focus on writing and speaking. Tutorial centres then focus on the gap that schools leave, and since they are under even more pressure to show improvement in a short period of time, naturally they focus on the skills that move the needle. Who is willing to spend time on listening and reading?

Now let's put ourselves in the shoes of the student for a moment. You have six subjects competing for your time to revise. You have homework for every subject. You probably go to tutorial centres. You get no break. You're low in confidence because you're stressed. So how would you spend your time revising? We all like to do things we're good at. No one likes to spend time on things we're not so strong at, even though that's where we need to put more time.

You follow the usual advice, you do more exercises, and the improvement doesn't show. Writing and speaking give you concrete things to change. Reading and listening don't. Naturally, it feels less effective, and you spend less time on it. And because progress is so slow, even the students who do put in the time end up putting it down to "I'm just not a language person."

Schools, tutorial centres, and now the students themselves. That triples down the time and effort given to writing and speaking, and that shows, because Paper 3 is worth 30% of the English grade, more than any other paper.

What we do differently

So, knowing all the problems and difficulties in improving reading and listening, what do we do that is different?

First of all, we understand the biggest problem students face, and that is time. As a former teacher, I fully understand the stress that students go through, and I have no intention of adding to it. So instead of requiring students to spend one to two hours a day doing full past papers, we designed practice that only takes 10 minutes a day, five days a week. It's short enough that on a packed and stressful day you might still be able to fit it in, and by doing it every day, it adds up.

The way we've designed it is to create a learning habit, probably the hardest thing to create. Once you have a habit, you keep working on it. And because life happens, five days a week leaves you at least two spare days. If something important comes up and you have to miss a day, you still have two days to make up for it.

Second, the way we've designed our practice is that we have grouped it by skills. As teachers, we would teach reading based on different reading skills, so learners can eventually pick them up. In listening, there is less of this. So we name the skill that the students are learning, we explain how it works, and we design the materials based on that, to do focused practice on it. So rather than picking up another listening or reading exercise or past paper and then facing a variety of skills that need to be practised, we design our own materials that focus on those.

Based on our analysis of the DSE papers, we can say that the reading paper keeps testing the same skills: finding a fact quickly, working out a word from the sentence around it, following who "they" and "it" refer to, and telling False apart from Not Given. Listening, on the other hand, focuses on catching the number, the name or the date as it goes past, especially when the speaker changes their mind, and then using what you heard together with the Data File in Part B.

If you want to see what this looks like for listening, recording by recording, I've written about it in our post on how we teach listening.

And finally, all of our daily practice is auto-marked, which means students don't need to wait for someone to mark it. They'll know what they did right or wrong, and they'll see the tip for the wrong or right answer while they still remember the reading passage or the listening they have just done.

No one should decide your ceiling for you

Most schools will stream students by ability into, say, an elite class, a middle class and a lower class. So from the first day, it can feel like you're already grouped into your destiny, and it is very difficult to break out of that group afterwards. I understand the logic behind it, and some of the benefits it would bring. But as we all know, in order to get really high marks, you need to do B2. And hearing year after year that you should stick to B1 to be safe becomes a confidence issue, even when that advice comes from a good place.

No one should be deciding whether you do B1 or B2. The time you need to decide is actually at the exam. So why let others, or yourself, decide which one to do months before the actual exam?

That's where our philosophy comes in. We want to build your ability, of course, but also the confidence in knowing you can do it. Don't gate yourself to a lower mark because of your confidence.

So we've built our listening course at three levels, all training the same skills, but with the difficulty set in the tracks, so that even students who are currently getting low marks in listening can find materials to practise their skills, better their ability and find their confidence again. No matter what level you're chasing, whether it be Level 4, Level 5* or Level 5**, we truly believe you'll find value in our course.

Try it for five days

Now, this may feel very different from what you're used to. I don't blame you, and I'm glad that you feel that way. So try out our free 5-day taster. We've packed what you can expect in our paid courses into those five days. In reading, you get to experience how we go through the different skills. In listening, you get to try out all three levels we have, before rounding it up with a task that combines two sources.

It's never too late to rebuild your learning habits. Let us help you find your beat. Sign up now to see that the decision was always yours.

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