Language Culture and Curriculum
Editor and Book Reviews Editor: Eoghan Mac Aogain (St Patrick's College)
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Volume: 12 Number: 3 Page: 285–296
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Resistance and Creativity in English Reading Lessons in Hong Kong
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Angel Mei Yi Lin
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In this paper, I analyse pupil-teacher dialogue, in a mixture of English and Cantonese, from a segment of a Form 2(Grade 8, 13-14yrs) English reading lesson. The lesson was video taped in a working-class
school in Hong Kong, and the excerpt is taken from a larger corpus of similar lesson data videotaped in the class over three consecutive weeks. The analysis shows how these Cantonese children, with limited
English, succeeded in subverting the reading lesson, which was based entirely on information extraction tasks.Instead, they negotiated their own preferred comic-style narratives by cleverly making use of
the response slots of the IRF (Initiation-Response-Feedback) discourse format used in the lesson. Thus they achieved genuinely creative responses, in spite of the curriculum. The implications for teaching
are discussed.
© Multilingual Matters 1999
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