HKCEE and Sound-based Approach of Learning

As a matter of urgency, some students who are taking the HKCEE next month ask for a quick-fix learning method to prepare for the exam in May.

Language learning takes time; practising with past papers, reading newspaper articles, revising grammar points and usages, watching or listening to English news, attending examination preparation tutorials will take you enormous amount of time.

Can a quick-fix learning strategy work in a month time? Well, if the traditional method cannot provide a quick-fix solution, you may want to try a relatively more natural learning method to speed up your learning. The method is called a sound-based approach of studying English.

The sound-based approach can speed up your learning by increasing for you the audio channel of learning input and output. The following provide some ideas and guidelines for implementing the sound-based approach preparing for the approaching exam.

1. Repetition - The essence of sound-based learning approach bases on its natural language techniques, i.e. we learn a language when repetitively listening to and understanding sounds and utterances of the language.
2. Input Comprehensible and Visible - The other essence of the sound-based approach is that language acquisition involves differentiating and associating sounds with corresponding meaning using your imaginative mind.
3. Be a Keen Learner - Be like a little child trying to learn to control his world by listening to the repeated instructions of adults, so listen to some read-aloud passages repetitively until you fully understand the audio messages and be able to act and use them accordingly.
4. Use your Right Brain - Listen to the video or audio recorded news as many time as possible until they unconsciously embedded in your right brain with the audio (such as different tones)and visual clues (such as mind map). You must learn to attach to the message with some visual clues when you repetitively listen to and watch the news.
5. Maximise your Resources - Some past-exam audio tapes, read-aloud texts can be good resources, you can recycle and use them for means and ends to facilitate your audio input and outputs. Make sure the audio resources must be a quality production, in other words, quality input results in quality output.