The Pedagogical Maze: Retrospection on CLT in Hong Kong

Abstract

For years the English proficiency of general Hong Kong students is said to be continuously declining. There is a common belief that the execution of mother tongue education is a main factor for this phenomenon. However, rarely have people mentioned, discussed or thought of the relationship between the falling English proficiency and the prevalent teaching methodology. This paper questions the overuse of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in the Hong Kong context. It pinpoints the key principles and features of CLT and examines the reality of Hong Kong students against these principles and features. It concludes through the comparison that although CLT is in vogue and meets the general desires of learning a new language, it has some limitations to a context like Hong Kong. Reality shows that CLT does not match the Hong Kong context in many aspects; overuse of it can only cause detrimental effects and fail the intended aim of using it to develop the learner’s communicative competence.