News and Speeches

Speeches (since 2005)

21 May 2005

SCOLAR Chairman, Mr Michael Tien, JP
at Press Conference for Closing Ceremony of English Festival 2005

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Good afternoon!

Thank you for coming. In a moment, the Closing Ceremony for SCOLAR's first English Festival will be staged. As a start, we have selected seven unique activities to include in the English Festival 2005, hoping to give students and public members of different ages and education background opportunities to learn and use English in ways that they would enjoy the most - for excitement seekers we have debating and word games; for language art lovers we have Shakespearean plays and poetry writing; for the more active type we have English playgroups, interactive drama and skipping with rhymes; and for those who like to sit back and relax we have our daily TV programme on English usage. The Festival certainly shows that there are thousands of ways to improve your English outside the classroom and it is open for each individual to explore and seize the opportunities.

I am proud to say that over the past months, an encouraging 20,000 individuals have participated in our Festival events. They include primary and secondary school students, parents and teachers. In addition, over 1.6 million people have watched our TV programme, "One Minute English", hosted by our Festival Ambassadors. And the number is still on the rise since, by popular demand, the programme is now on a re-run on TVB Jade until next month. This is certainly an achievement for SCOLAR, even though we have been organising many other equally successful projects in promoting English, such as the Workplace English Campaign, or the earlier English in the Air Programme, etc.

But what impressed us the most is not the participant figures. Rather, it is the degree of involvement of our participants. In particular, the language teachers involved have shown a tremendous amount of dedication and commitment in striving to create and maximise the language learning environment to motivate their students. I must take this opportunity to commend these teachers who are certainly role models for their counterparts and all teachers-to-be.

Of course, SCOLAR is going to offer more than a few words of praise. With the support of the Education and Manpower Bureau and the Legislative Council, we are now actively devising different measures to strengthen our support to language teachers and students in the pre-primary and primary levels through the use of the Language Fund. In particular, we would wish to focus more resources on teachers' professional development and to address other imminent needs of primary schools and kindergartens. SCOLAR would also examine ways to recruit more quality young men and ladies to join the profession. I hope that today's ceremony would also showcase how fruitful and rewarding it is to be a language teacher.

Other members in the community have been very enthusiastic as well - over the past months, we received many phone calls and e-mails enquiring about how to enroll in our activities, where to download Festival materials for teaching their students or children, and even what we are going to do next. These are all very encouraging signs and they give us the drive to go the extra mile in promoting English. We will encourage more students to participate in language arts activities such as debating and drama, and we will bring their best acts and arguments to the community as well. We will also work harder to promote reading - not just among children, but also parents, teachers, and every other individual in Hong Kong too.

Before I stop, I would like to express our big gratitude to all seven organisations that have brought together their best to the first English Festival. You should be proud of yourselves. My thanks also go to our Festival Ambassadors, Mandy and Alex, who have really done a lot in the past two months to preach our messages in the community.

SCOLAR will continue to work hard on creating a more motivating language learning environment in Hong Kong, as well as building a strong and professional language teaching force. We look forward to the support of the whole community - schools, teachers, students and parents - let's join hand to make this happen.

Thank you, and I hope you would all enjoy the show.