Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1980

we have a large staff of people simply translating them so that our students can read them in Chinese, or do we devote that effort to enabling our students to have access to this knowledge in English? As an educator, I would say the latter one is better. You could say that there is a built-in disadvantage for speakers of Chinese since a large amount of the contemporary knowledge that is being produced in the world is being produced in the English language——the international language of communication in the academic world. This is not to chauvinistically promote the English language——it is simply a fact. As educators our task is to provide students with the English language skills which will give them access to this knowledge. Q. W e are aware that there is a need in our society for bilingual proficiency of a general and a specific nature. In what wa y is the English language teaching programme at The Chinese University designed to meet this need? A. The answer to the first question about 'general' proficiency in English is that this is not our immediate concern. At the University, we are not so much concerned with promoting general English skills. (I am not even sure what the term means, but I suppose it means general interpersonal communication skills.) W e have a very specific job to do at this University and our language tasks are primarily geared to meeting those specific needs. To improve the students' skill in using English for the specific purpose of maximizing their intellectual potentials, and to provide them with access to the world of learning is our educational goal and our educational commitment to our undergraduates. To our undergraduates we say we will help you to maximize your intellectual potential, in real terms, this means we will help you to be able to read your textbooks efficiently, to be able to write skillfully, to say exactly what you mean. To do this, our Language Teaching Division has designed first-year English courses whose goal is precisely to improve the quality of English communication skills for study at The Chinese University. This is very much an internal kind of goal and we take it as our responsibility that no student at this University should be prevented from doing as well as he or she can because of the lack of proficiency in English. Ou r purpose is to help them in their learning of the various courses and to provide hopefully a service to them as undergraduate students. Q. But, as far as I know, we did offer General English Courses to our undergraduates previously? A. Right, we had previously General English Courses to develop a general proficiency in English. W e think we can do better by focusing on our students' needs. Our concern at the momen t is always to identify what they need so that w e could provide courses to meet those needs. If we have learnt anything in education in the past 50 years, it is that you have got to clearly define what you want to do and what you are teaching. This is not something peculiar to English teaching, it is part of learning as a whole. A General English Course——and as I said previously, I do not know what that term means ——is a very non-specific kind of course, so we do not know whether w e are meeting their needs or not. To help them talk and listen, read and write about general material is a very vague kind of educational project. W e now have first-year English courses instead, which are designed to serve the learning needs of students at The Chinese University during their undergraduate studies. In terms of their undergraduate studies, for example, they do not need to know the niceties and the conventions of English conversation and so on. W e do not spend much time on that but rather on the problems of interpreting textbooks, of listening to lectures, of writing laboratory reports and things like that. W e want them to feel fluent and to be able to communicate with their instructors and express their understanding of their specialist studies in English should they be required to do so. To meet the English language communication needs of our graduates when they go into the Hong Kong community, we have a range of advanced proficiency courses that look towards our students being graduates. As I said, one of our jobs is to provide them with the English language skills that will enable them to put into practice the quality of learning that w e have given them in the various disciplines, and to ensure that they will obtain the positions that are commensurate with the knowledge and skills that they have learned here. This is not a perfect world. Many of the people who go to apply for jobs do not perform adequately because they are not able to communicate adequately what they 2 2