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Homework Correction

文：Cogitatio

One of the difficulties that I face in correcting my students' homework is their language barrier. Religious Education is a subject that emphasizes reflections and sharing. The students habitually think in the logic of the Cantonese language, but the school requires them to express themselves in English, a language that they are not yet familiar with. When they do R.E. (Religious Education) homework, they would first think in Cantonese and then translate their ideas into English. When they don't know how to express themselves in English, they would simply write less.

Often when I correct their homework, I have to translate their sentences word by word from English into Chinese in order to understand what they are trying to say. This has taken me a lot of time and mental energy. In addition to this, there are grammatical and spelling mistakes as serious as these:

1. A better life → A better live

2. Bismarck was a German statesman. → Bismarck was a German statement. (This sentence is taken from a Form 6 History essay.)

3. I ate all the grapes. → I ate all the graphs.

Now imagine that you are faced with a page of homework full of spelling and grammatical mistakes like the aforementioned ones. You can do nothing except laughing out loud in the staff room so that everybody can hear. Your brain would simply be stuck and exhausted as you try to guess what your students mean.

For those students whose English is much better, the situation is as difficult as the "poorer" students. One of the students wrote in her Lenten reflections, "I am very lucky, but often I don't realize that I am lucky." And then she wrote the Chinese translation of this sentence --- 身在福中不知福. Putting these two sentences into comparison, the English one is, of course, not as precise as the Chinese translation.

This is why I'm increasingly against the school's language policy. I think that subjects that emphasize on human feelings and reflections (like Religious Education and Ethics) should be taught in the mother tongue. Since the mother tongue is the first language that children learn, it is always easier to express oneself in his mother tongue than in a second or third language.