“Nothing bad can happen. It can only good happen.” Donald J. Trump It would be easy to write off the regular word salads of America’s 47th president as the increasingly incoherent ramblings of an elderly man in obvious mental and physical decline. However, one can also argue that Trump’s seemingly dyslexic struggles with the English…
Setting a timer to take a short break after every 25 minutes of study, compiling a “mistakes booklet” to learn from past errors and using artificial intelligence to boost English skills are among the strategies used by top scorers in this year’s university entrance exam in Hong Kong. However, some of the 24 high achievers…
While a score of seven points out of a maximum of 42 in Hong Kong’s Diploma of Secondary Education (DSE) exams might seem low to some, for non-verbal student Tam Chun-yu it is a massive accomplishment, achieved by typing his answers with just one finger. At the Hong Kong Red Cross John F Kennedy Centre,…
For Manaal Khan, the gruelling journey of taking Hong Kong’s university entrance examination was not just an academic challenge but also a linguistic trial. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Khan, who is of Pakistani descent, kept going through her difficult days at secondary school by holding on to her dream of becoming a modern-day…
Last week, while preparing a lecture on the visual culture of the Global South, I caught Google’s Gemini in a double hallucination. Cross-referencing a historical event between English and Chinese data sets, I found the English AI to be authoritative but inventing citations. In Chinese, the fabrications vanished but so did global context, replaced by…
The numbers tell a revealing story. The city’s eight publicly funded universities, once primarily judged by academic output and global rankings, are now generating record income from knowledge transfer. Patents, licensing deals, industry partnerships. These are not side activities. They are becoming core business lines. Universities are no longer just custodians of knowledge. They are…
More than 70 public schools, or nearly 9 per cent, have joined a new scheme in Hong Kong to hire native English-speaking teachers (NETs) that offers lower pay but higher recruitment flexibility. Under the scheme launched this academic year, operators were given a grant to hire such teachers, to enhance the effectiveness of English-language instruction…
English-speaking con artists have targeted university students seeking summer internships, using a bogus 40-minute orientation session for one victim to make their dubious job offers appear genuine, Hong Kong police have warned. The force issued the alert after a 19-year-old first-year university student fell for a dubious job offer last month and lost nearly HK$190,000…
Suri Chan Tin-wing, a first-year English major at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, found herself struggling to write her first creative short story – a 300-word assignment for the compulsory course “Introduction to Literature”. Throughout her secondary schooling at Yan Chai Hospital Law Chan Chor Si College in Kowloon Bay, only science subjects, such…
Hong Kong is considering letting more junior secondary school pupils use English as their medium of instruction (MOI), with the education minister pointing to an improved learning environment, better qualified teachers and other developments in the sector. Secretary for Education Christine Choi Yuk-lin also said on Thursday that publicly funded primary and secondary schools could…